Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy and confidentiality are very important to us as social creatures. Despite the fact that we enjoy coming together and sharing, there are times that we want to be alone with ourselves and our thoughts. Not only that, it is more than just what we feel, the laws also protect our privacy and confidentiality to a certain extent. It is obvious that we value having it but yet at the same time we are risking and potentially jeopardizing it when we use new media. Edward Snowden has shown how our information is kept and being used with us not knowing. The information can be gathered from new media so it is important to be aware of what we put on it.

For Facebook, some of the information placed on it may be accessible by the public. New media allows open sharing and this can be a bad thing at times. There is the problem of putting up too much information. Perhaps we may even put up information that we only meant to share with a few people but others could share the information too. Some examples of various new media platforms keeping track of our information such as locations would include Google which may track us if we use location services. Facebook may also utilize location services to see if you are nearby certain locations. Another thing to keep in mind would be that as we make more and more accounts on new media platforms, others can gather a better idea of who the person is and piece together all of the information. I would definitely not enjoy knowing that there is a stranger out there who knows everything about me.