Posts tagged facebook
The Fine Line of Internet Privacy
Feb 28th
Many people argue that in this “Internet Age” their privacy is at risk. Facebook has been one of the primary social networking websites to face wrath from its users about privacy concerns. Complaints have ranged from users being angry that their profile information is too accessible to learning that Facebook has been giving out their user’s personal information to companies that track your Internet browsing habits. This allows companies to link anonymous browsing habits to specific people, and this is becoming increasingly popular for things such as advertising. Allowing companies to track your browsing habits online enables the Internet to become an even more personalized experience, with information and advertising specific to things you like. However, some companies such as Facebook have even started allowing third-parties to view your profile information, including things like name, address and phone number. This is what advertising is coming to now that the world is becoming so Internet-based, so my advice is to get used to it. But even so, there should be a fine line about tracking users to make their experiences better, and tracking users to exploit them.
GOING VERTICAL
Specialization on the internet has been going on for quite some time. In recent years, search engines have been made to crawl a constrained portion of the web, rather than the entire thing (Halavais 2). Companies such as LexisNexis created databases that search for only legal information. These types of things are the beginning of what is making the Internet such a personalized experience. It’s what you want, when you want it. There is so much on the Internet that it is impossible for search engines to show you everything out there on any given search. Alexander Halavais wrote in Search Engine Society that, “The idealized metaphor for the search engine may be a telescope, allowing us to pick out one star from millions and examine it in more detail.” If a company was following my browsing history and could help me to find more websites or ads that I would enjoy, then I would have no problem with it.
WHY ARE YOU SO AGGREGATED
Most commercial websites, including social network ones like Facebook, use third party tracking agents called aggregators to observe your browsing habits. You may have noticed in your daily lives that if you go to a lot of websites based on things such as cooking or sports, you will see corresponding advertisements on other websites based on your recent Web browsing history. Facebook has also started allowing the transmission of unique identifiers. “With a unique identifier, a tracking site could gain access to a user’s name, physical address, email address, gender, birth date, educational and employment information, and much more” (1). This is where your privacy is at stake, because there is a risk of having your identity linked to an inaccurate or misleading browsing profile. Plus, if a computer is used by more than one person, there is the potential for misinterpretation. Facebook has added ways to prevent third-parties from tracking you through their privacy settings, but most users do not take the time to take advantage of them. The collection of data does not seem intrusive until it is networked, findable, and available to a wide group of people (Halavais 44). I would have to agree with this and state that there is a fine line between looking at your browsing history and having access to your personal information. At times these third parties are working to make your web experience more personal, but there are too many instances where your personal information can be exploited. This is where the main problem lies.
While most companies are using your information to predict what content and advertisements you want to see, giving them access to your personal information seems like it is a step to far in regards to privacy. But if the information is being used solely to give you access to content that is spot-on to your interests, this is something that can make the Internet better. The Internet is such a major hub for people,major television networks and magazine and newspaper companies aren’t even in the same league when it comes to how they advertise. Giving you access to ads specific to your browsing history is only something that the Internet can offer, and it will continue in the future.
Some companies are even creating policies in regards to your own privacy on their websites, and I think this can only be a good thing. AOL, for example, lets users opt-out of targeting, and Yahoo is working on a policy to obscure people’s computer identification addresses that are connected to search results, and Microsoft says it does not link any of its visitors’ behavior to their user names; even if those people are registered (4). Creating such policies helps, and as time goes forward I think that companies will still be able to learn its user’s preferences without having to sink into their personal information.
References:
Halavais, A. (2009). Search engine society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chapter 6
Michael R. Fancher, The 21st Century Journalist’s Creed
Story, L. (2007). To aim ads, web is keeping closer eye on you. New York Times
Internet Privacy- Social Media Giving Out Personal Information? http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_articles/internet_privacy_social_media_giving_out_personal_information
Has AIM Been Fired?
Jan 24th
Remember when everyone and their mother was on AOL Instant Messenger? The days when you kept it on 24/7 and put every update of your life in your away message? Like I really thought people cared when I put up the message “shower” or “getting my haircut.” But have you noticed that the number of people on your Buddy List is dwindling lately when you sign on? It’s likely due to the fact that a few years ago there were not nearly as many ways to interact digitally with friends, family, and loved ones as there are now. Think about it for a second. Within the past 5 years people have so many more options on how to interact; whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, through a text message on your Blackberry, or even Skype. I remember back when I was in middle school and first got on AIM, and it literally changed the way I communicated with friends. There was less talking over the phone and more typing on the keyboard. Now instead of calling all your friends individually to invite them to a party, why not just send them a Facebook invite and be done in half the time? It is clear that the way we communicate interactively is always changing, and the concepts and changes in interactive communications were developed long before the first computer. Here’s a brief history.
AS WE MAY THINK
Vannevar Bush published the article “As We May Think” in 1945 to try to persuade fellow scientists that a new way of communication was possible. It was amazing to me how Bush predicted things such as hypertext, the Internet and even Wikipedia, explaining “The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk” (2). This was all to be done with a “memory machine” that would now stands as the basis for the computer. Using terms such as “compute” and “links” to describe his machine in an era right after WWII is fascinating to me, and I was even waiting for him to use the term “tweet” at one point. Bush also spoke about placing pictures on a screen in which people could comment, which is basically a prediction of Facebook photo albums, if you don’t consider that a stretch.
THE COMPUTER AS A COMMUNICATION DEVICE
In 1968, a man by the name of J.C.R. Licklider followed up on Vannevar Bush’s predictions and became one of the more celebrated people in computing history. In his article “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Licklider asks the question, “Is it really seeing the expression in the other’s eye that makes the face-to-face conference so much more productive than the telephone’s conference call, or is it being able to create and modify external models (23). It’s so rare now that we are able to communicate with everyone face-to-face, whether it be at work or with a friend who lives across the country. With computers and phones, however, we are able to write our feelings in text and use terms like “lol” to tell the person you’re interacting with that you’re laughing, even though they can’t actually see you. Also in this article, Licklider developed the term “computer network,” from which he states, “through them all members of the supercommunity can communicate with other people, with programs, with data, or with selected combinations of those resources” (32). He made it clear that interactive communication consists of short spurts of dialog, and that still has not changed to this day.
THE DEMO
Around the same time as the Licklider essay, Douglas Engelbart gave a demo that actually showed a computer at work. By showing programs that looked like Microsoft Word, and copying and pasting using a mouse, it was clear that the world was about to embark in a new wave of interactive communication. The ability to show pictures and make graphs is another basis for programs we have today, from Google Maps to Photoshop, and are all ways that we are able to communicate digitally. I never knew of these three men before this class, but their forward-thinking shows me how big of a change communication has had from their time to now, and how big the change will be in the future.
So in all, it’s clear that times change. From the earliest days of the computer we were talking about interactive communication. With each year there is some kind of change in how we communicate. I’m sure in due time, Twitter will be a faux pas, just as AIM is becoming today. Even the way we date has changed, as one of my classmates put it, and can be done through dating websites and relationships can be developed over things like text messages. These ways that we communicate were predicted, in part, by the three men mentioned above. I can only imagine what’s going to come next.
References:
Licklider, J.C.R., (1968). Computer as a communication device. Science and Technology
Engelbart Demo
Bush, Vaneevar. (1945). As We May Think.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
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