Blog: Privacy
How the issues of privacy and confidentiality are related to new media?
With the rapid growth of new media nowadays, there are also a rapid concern about privacy. Millions of users are placing their private information online, either by creating new social media accounts or when they subscribe to a new podcast or streaming services. Users are giving many companies that operate these new media services the trust that their private or personal information will be protected from name, birthday, I.D.#, emails, credit card number, and bank account information. As reported in The New York Times article "The Wild West of Privacy", the large Internet companies Google, Facebook, and others collect information about its' users and "they deploy in the service of advertisers.. then sell that data to all kinds of companies that want to learn everything from our habits to our health, form our sexual orientation to. our finances." The rise and dependency on these companies has left many people no choice but allow these big companies to practice these bad actions. Target's security breach a couple of years ago is another example how consumers' privacies and confidentiality is not protected, over a 100 millions of people's personal data were hacked. The worse part is that there are no strict government laws that prevent this, as there are small fines for these actions, as well as consumer privacy bills that don't pass in congress. As a result, these large companies that control many of the new media has the advantage over consumers in terms of privacy. Users can protect their privacy but the one major way to do that would be not using any new media.
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