The Digital Divide.: Privacy

When the founding fathers wrote the constitution and Bill of Rights, they had hoped that the provisions would create a foundation for the protection of citizens' privacy which could further, be expanded by future generations. However, they probably wouldn't have imagined the world we live in today with cars, planes, trains, and computers just to name a few of our modern advances nor the need for the confidentiality of our personal data. In the article titled ‘Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations’ by Daniel Reed (2011), he had stated that;

“This Castle Doctrine followed settlers to the colonies and was later codified in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." (para. 2)

Overtime these laws have failed to keep up with the rapidly changing world and developing technology and because of this, unfortunately, sometimes laws, and regulations to protect our privacy, security, and confidentiality are slow to be created and adopted and even slower to implement. Regrettably, within the USA we have fewer expectations of privacy and confidentiality and that is why the government and even many tech companies take advantage of the many loopholes that still exist. Reed (2011) had also pointed out that there are differences between privacy and security because we need security to protect our private information, but you can have security without privacy (para. 4).

New media has revolutionized the world but it has also created many new layers to the complicated topic of privacy and confidentiality, for example, it’s against the law for the government or anyone to open someone else's regular mail sent through the post office, but when it comes to emails those protections can be a bit tricky because it brings up the question of who owns our emails, the email provider, the user, or the ones who own the servers... How about what we post on social networking sites like Facebook, do they own what we post or do we as the users own our own data and should we really expect privacy and confidentiality if we post things online that are intended to be private but are exposed to the public. One of the challenges that come up is that many of these tools are actually free to use but with something being given away, there are usually hidden cost because many of these so-called free sites still need to make money and they do so by selling customers data to other companies who repackage them and use the information for targeted advertising or other reasons and users sometimes unknowing sign away their rights when they agree to use the services that are nicely packaged as free. For example with all the benefits that new media offers it can also at times feel like a trojan horse, ones you use one of these tools they unleash thousands of pages with complex jargons and user agreements with complicated terms and services that hardly anyone reads and then they place cookies within user's computers that track their every move. And if you want something removed that you disagree with, well good luck with that.

For that reason, the European Union had created a level of protection for its citizens but which we in the USA also get to, in a limited way, also enjoy. The EU put into place the ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ or ‘GDPR’ in order to keep pace with the rapid changes in technology, while also protecting an individual’s privacy and confidentiality and giving them more control over their data. That’s why when we log into a page, we see popups or banners indicating that the site is collecting cookies.

New media has also opened up the door to massive hacking of personal information and data breaches at a global scale that many companies have failed to curve or stop the attacks which are sometimes even coming from foreign entities as cyberwarfare. Sadly, not even Universities are immune as we saw from the article titled ‘University of Maryland, computer security breach exposes 300,000 records’ by Patrick Svitek and Nick Anderson (2014) were more than 300,000 personal records from faculty, staff and students were compromised by an outside source that gained access through a secure records database and duplicated all the information without changing any of the data within the database but they took information such as names, social security numbers, date of births and university ID numbers. More recently the credit monitoring company Equifax who has agreed to pay over $650 Million in the largest data breach settlement to date has also been affected by data breaches (Cowley, 2019). Not even government departments or computer serves are immune to hacking. However, this has also created a multibillion-dollar security industry. For example, in the article, we read titled ‘Target works on security-heavy credit cards, after breach’ by Dara Kerr (2014), in which target had accelerated its $100 million programs to offer users chip-enabled smart credit cards with encryption technology where users personal data are supposed to be harder to hack but only time will tell. The underbelly of new media has also spurned other privacy and confidentially issues which have been caused by fraud, and scams which we had also covered in our previous readings, but other growing threats include spam-ware, malware, spyware, ransomware, trojans, worms, and viruses to name a few.

But another growing problem is what’s been termed catfishing in which a person creates a fake identity on a social network account that targets a specific victim for abuse, deception or fraud and where they steal another person's identity and info.

Inconclusion, it all boils down to the old saying which was ‘buyer beware’ to now it being adapted to the more modern term as ‘user beware’ because as users of new media tools and technology we have to remember that what we don’t want others knowing about us shouldn’t post it online. However, this is easier said than done because our data are always being collected without us even noticing or caring since its everywhere around us from our cellphones to our smart-TVs and even the CCTV on the corner streets. Maybe if we all took a more proactive approach to our data and information, we might be able to stop big companies and even the government from profiting from our information but this would mean a major shift in our attitudes and beliefs of indifference, not caring or disinterested to actually advocating for stronger laws and regulations to protect our privacy and confidential information and data from being used without our consent. Finally, in the article titled ‘'The Wild West of Privacy' by Joe Nocera (2014) he had spoken with some privacy experts and asked them about what should be included in a privacy bill which included regulating data brokers, and to give companies an incentive to prevent data breaches with high penalty fines to name a few tips which can further protect all users from their information being misused or falling into the wrong hands.