Digital Privacy And Social Media

How much privacy do we have? Everything we go on social media and the internet is tracked, recorded and stored by phone, the Internet, and social media providers. Our personal information is not private anymore. In reality, we are under the illusion that our information is being kept private. Although the internet has the potential to provide enormous benefits for consumers, it also has significant privacy and security implications. Data collection has become extremely valuable not only to the government but also to social media and online marketing companies trying to maximize their reach. We are unaware that everything we do online is being gathered by these corporations and we do not know how the information is being used. We get free services

Whether we like it or not, all technology platforms we use are invading our privacy, thus we need protection from the intrusion and misused of our personal information. Theodore Claypoole, in “Privacy and Social Media”, states that “The FTC and state legislatures are taking steps to protect the American public from inappropriate intrusions on their privacy through social media.” He also acknowledged that in addition to these restriction we need to take responsibility and use better judgement on what information we publicly share. Fortunately, the state of California now has a law protecting our digital privacy rights. According to “California Now Has the Nation’s Best Digital Privacy Law” by Kim Zetter, this new law “…[restricts] any state law enforcement agency or other investigative entity from compelling a business to turn over any metadata or digital communications—including emails, texts, documents stored in the cloud—without a warrant.” This law is taking us a step closer to ensure Americans’ digital privacy. It will hopefully be use as a model for the rest of the nation in making sure that all people have privacy

In addition, they state that they not only protect us, but the information they collect is used in advertisements to detect preferences that brings benefits not only for their businesses but for the customers as well. Facebook for example, has implemented a new security system that will alert us if our account has been compromised in any way by intruders. The article “Facebook Will Now Alert You If a Country is Trying to Hack You” by Alexander Howard, states that the social network will “send you a warning notice if it thinks your account has been "targeted by an attacker" associated with a nation-state.” The network also sends notifications every time someone logs in to your account from a different device. Besides this new feature, Facebook is also well known to use their user’s information to sponsor products that have been selected based on their interests and online