The internet has brought about the possibility of networking easily. Everywhere and literary everything that a person does calls for some private information to be released. This therefore calls for concern on whether the information can be accessed by any interested party after one has released it. It is possible for a person, company or organization to access real time information from anywhere around the world all thanks to the internet. It is for this reason that many people have embraced it, more so the social media. But there is one dark cloud that has ever seems to be hanging on the heads of internet users, and this is the safety and privacy of the information the users give and which makes them worried about how other people could find this information to be of use.
This leads one to the question of how private, can private information be, because there is no privacy to such information after all. Do people really care about the use of this information by other interested parties? Many a time people post information about their whereabouts, the cities they reside in and even their places of work. This therefore makes it possible for interested parties to track them down very easily. Interestingly, when people give such information never think about the implications that come with such an action until they are faced with situations when they are given information about their lives, more so private lives by people who do not know them at a personal level.
It then calls for people to be very careful on the information they release to social media sites like Facebook and other platforms that call for social interaction with the world. It is even more important that people know of the people who could be gaining access to their data trail lest the wrong or right information ends in the hands of the right of wrong people therefore releasing information that people should not have released in the first place (Solove 3).
Most employers and even the government these days have access to all kinds of information about persons that they might be interested in. most people on the other hand have developed the “ I don’t care kind of attitude” when it comes to the information they release about themselves. This is in the pretext of not having anything to hide from anyone (Solove para 2). These people with this attitude only allude to bad things about themselves they believe that they do not have and therefore nothing to hide. But the truth of the matter is that not only bad things can be subjected to scrutiny but good ones too. It is not always that good things or rather innocent actions cannot be found to be faulty by certain standards. This is a human aspect that should not be ignored at all.
Lately, Facebook and other social media sites have set the platform for the least expected people to keep track of other people’s lives. People often pot all manner of information on these sites for instance their emotional feelings which might communicate their attitudes towards life and other things that in one way or another affect their lives (Fletcher para 4) . To a huge extent, such emotional comments and updates that people write communicate a whole lot of who they are and their personality. Such innocent acts end up passing wrong or right signals which will end up making other people pass judgment on a person’s character. While pouring one’s heart out to the masses may seem to be a sincere act, this might cost someone and really get to unravel the skeletons in one’s closet.
It is should be a matter of concern that the various internet service providers such as social media sites to really take precaution to protect the privacy of the users of their services. This should be done in such a way that the users are guaranteed protection from hackers who may access their information and use it without their consent (Stein para 8). This way, the users can be sure of the safety of all information about them because at least they will know that there will be no unauthorized person who sneaks in and gets access to the information that they are not supposed to have. If the privacy of internet users is taken seriously and be protected, users can also feel safe to share all they will want to share about themselves. Luckily enough some service providers have taken this matter seriously and have used all possible means to ensure that it is never easy to access a person’s information without their consent.
Facebook for instance, has introduced a privacy setting whereby users are in a better position to control their privacy. These privacy control settings are simpler as third party services are turned off. A person is supposed to change the privacy settings at will and unless one does this, then all information is free for view by all and sundry. This therefore means that one has got to learn how to go about it because it is not by default that a person’s privacy is protected. This is one way of trying to conceal information to everyone who is interested to access information about someone.
The government on the other hand should also regulate how information that is released through the internet is used. This is so because these social networking sites have been the cause of many cyber crimes that are committed on the day today happenings throughout the world. For instance, there has been a rise of the number of abductions that have resulted from people falling for disguises online. There has been a trend of creating fake profiles just to use them in committing crimes (Solove 48). Yes many parents are a worrying lot because their children spend so much time in chat rooms chatting with online friends who may or may not be real and genuine people.
Away from the fear of chatting and vital information being accessed by people that one may not want to associate with, there is a warring trend of people falling into online frauds through online purchasing. A person can use information sourced from the internet, to disguise as another person in carrying out transactions therefore ending up into the hands of fraudsters. Lack of consumer privacy is the main reason why many people hold back from carrying out online transactions. If only the government could step in and form rules and regulations of the game that will help protect people, then use of the internet will have brought more harm than good.
Most people who have interacted online via the social media sites have assumed a very important aspect of the online community which is a person’s digital identity. Many people have one or a multiple digital identities courtesy of having multiple accounts on different sites with conflicting information about themselves. This has been made possible by the lack of a serious arrangement whereby a person cannot use false information online. There is a challenge in establishing how truthful information given online is credible and this is the point where the government comes in. It is of utmost importance that policies are put in place so as to ensure that people give credible information about themselves in any forum so as to avoid confusion about anyone. With different online accounts that bare conflicting information, a person will be seen to own several characters and personalities that can be misleading.
One of the many solutions to the issue of online cheating is by the government and the service providers coming up with a process where the information given by a person at the point of enrolment is justifiable and true. The enrollment process has got several stages that include the initial registration, presenting of credentials, authentication, and verification of information. There should be put in place a chain of trust between the users, the people that this user is going to interact with and the general public. The government and service providers should be tasked to establish how reliable the user is and even the whole process of registration.
Other measures need to be put in place such as making it very difficult to duplicate and alter the information of other people (Solove 19). This begins with the email addresses, user names, the passwords and even the photographs used. If this is done, it will be difficult for one entity to duplicate information therefore forming a very strong link between the credentials used and the owner of the credential. This will lead to fraudsters and such people finding it hard to hack and use information that is not theirs.
The world today is a hub where information can be transferred far and wide in a very short time. It is therefore necessary the right kind of information about a person be released to the public, and this should be done with the consent of the person in question. This is so because the privacy of a person needs to be respected at all costs because it really does matter that what is private be treated as so. Data mining has become very common and easy thereby making it necessary that stronger and firm privacy terms and conditions be developed by service providers. This will then make it possible to keep private what needs to be private and public of information that needs to be public.
It is of utmost importance that companies restrict access to information of a user displayed on their websites. It is also of necessity that these companies also remove all user generated content from the public domain so as to respect the privacy of the users. This should be made it possible by the government stepping in to form policies that necessitate this. It is only through this that this is going to work in the quest to respect individual space as well as the privacy of a person (Solove 36). The privacy of a person should reign paramount in any activity that involves the use of the internet because if information is just laid bare, then it can work for or against a person in very many ways.
Works Cited
Fletcher, Dan. How Facebook is Redefining Privacy. 20th May 2010. Web, 6th August 2012.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1990798,00.html
Solove, Daniel. Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’. 15th May 2011. Web,
6th August 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
Solove, Daniel. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. New York.
NYU Press. (2004)
Stein, Joel. Data Mining: How Companies Now Know Everything About You. 10th Mar
2011.Web, 6th August 2012, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2058205,00.html
