Thursday, March 13, 2014

Security and Privacy

Privacy has become a bit of a luxury we've taken for granted.  If you're old enough to remember the days of limited internet access and no cells phones, then you remember how easy it was to be "off the grid" in a sense.  Pictures were shared in person in large binders called "photo albums", music was shared by recording it onto a tape or cd and physically bringing it to your friend.  If the person you called was not at home, there was no way you could reach them.  They were simpler times.

Today, our privacy (and in some ways safety) is up in the air at all times.  Unfortunately the biggest social media site in existence (the place where people willingly share ridiculously personal things) has some of the worst privacy flaws.  In Rebecca Greenfield's article Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even The Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private, she takes us through an unfortunate incident involving a family photo and the sister of the man who created this unholy mess.  Luckily this was just a harmless Christmas photo.  Imagine if racy or incriminating photos were uploaded? what then?  I thinks it's unfortunate that we've put so much blind faith behind social media.  It's time to step back a bit and think about what we're doing and how we should go about accomplishing it.

1 comment:

  1. I do agree that we should all be much more conscious of giving up information for free. If people could visualize the path of what happens to the the information that they have shared they would probably be much selective about what they put out there. Someone shared a photo of my that someone else posted without my knowlege or consent and that made this issue personal for me.

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