Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy and confidentiality have become a primary issue that people are dealing with at the time when new media has a great impact on people’s usual life. People like to use social networking sites to commute with each other. However, by using these sites, the privacy of users’ own information is very doubtful. For example, People use face book to spread their news by putting up words and pictures. Sometimes, users may want to upload some information that only share with friends, so they use the private option that face book has provided to users. In other hand, face book still reserve a right to check on the information that users had uploaded as private information. Let’s assume if a people who work for face book has noticed this private information that somehow related to him, he may spread this information in some different ways other than using social networking sites. This assumption raises a question on the “privacy” option that face book claims. In addition, face book also required to share inferior information with FBI or other police departments to check on criminal activities. Some legal but private information may have a greater chance that being seen by more people other than the people that users originally would like to share with. This just one example of how “public” that these social networking sites indeed are.

Further more, there are many shocking news about how new media has lead to an innocent people to death. For instant, the recent shocking news, that a teenage boy had jumped from a bridge into Hudson River and died, had alarmed people that the dangerous of using new media in an improper. The roommate of the boy’s friend used Skype to record the sexual encounter of the boy with another guy, and then the roommate also twitted to about 150 followers about it and asked people with iChat to watch this video. These are all the popular new media that people use often to commute with each other. However, some people use them to reveal another people’s privacy and their actions always have a great impact on the victims since new media is a wide range spreading tools. The tragedy of boy is not the only alarm to tell people that privacy is a serious problem in new media. There are many other things had happened before that relate to the use of new media. I think that we should establish some critical laws on prohibiting the use of new media as soon as possible that prevent the happening of more tragedies.