The issue of privacy is nothing new in our society. We often hear news about personal information leak and it causes tremendous harm to the daily users. Privacy used to means just our right to own our physical space or property. However, informational privacy becomes a concern in this growing digital society. People give out their information on the internet every day and they ignore the fact that their information can be used somewhere else by some other people. They do it without the users’ consent and it is totally unacceptable. Some might argue that they got their consent through the term of service. However, I am pretty sure that people didn’t really want to agree with those terms if they had a choice. It might be okay to let the company that is providing service to use the information, but it is definitely not okay to sell it to a third party company and let people make a profit out of it. Trading users’ information can be dangerous, especially there could be a possible security breach and transferring information and hackers can take an advantage of it.
Moreover, the issue of confidentiality is also a big problem in our society. People can spread false information or hate speech on the internet without getting caught if they really want to hide their identity. Confidentiality can definitely help to protect people from potential harms including psychological harm such as embarrassment or distress. However, this also raises the problem of cyber-bullying which people, especially teenagers, can do harms to others without caring the consequences because they think that the others are not going to find out who they are and their real life won’t get affected anyways even if they are doing negative things on the internet.
Overall, I think there should a balance between privacy and confidentiality. It won’t do us any good if we either get too much of privacy or too much or confidentiality
I personally believe that majority of the users who click they agree to the "Term of Agreement", they do not know what they are getting themselves into. Those lengthy paragraphs state a plethora of useful information and I believe that because of the length and context within, users are actually punishing themselves by not reading it and simply agreeing to it to get it over with.
ReplyDeleteYou raised a great point about not actually realizing the aggregate information we give online and what companies can do with it. Also, many of us just scroll to the end of the endless paragraphs to accept without knowing what we agreed to. I think it would be better if companies had a brief summary of the terms which would be much easier for us to read and understand the complexities of what we are agreeing to.
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