Privacy & Confidentiality

Because new media has made such advancements, the privacy of an individual is nothing but to be violated. Any web application used in today's day and age, requires a user to put their personal information in. Users happily give up their information without even thinking twice what them sharing their personal information can lead to. To make an account with anything over the web, a user must provide their email, even some emailing websites require you to have an email already. If you sign up for a magazine or a bank account in person, you have to provide your mailing address. Corporations love keeping track of their customers and sending them unnecessary invitations to their businesses. However, this ends up violating their consumers privacy. There will always be those are always trying to harm others even if they have to gain their personal information by going through their mail. However, putting personal information online is even a bigger threat to our right to privacy. Ever shop online? It is now easier than ever for a hacker to extract information from websites and steal credit card information online. Then on top of that, all of the new media social networking websites ask users for their personal information, not that they are required to give out every single detail, but there are still those who haven't fully understood how it could harm them. Those users put up information like their cell phone numbers, exact address, what time they get back from school and how long they are alone for in their house. This is just an invitation for those who want to harm us. Even using your own wireless network is considered a threat of you privacy. Many wireless internet users don't even bother putting a password on their wireless internet connection, leaving themselves open to the world. Anyone driving by their house could easily make copies of important documentation, whether it be something with your social security number, or whether it be a trading secret. This all could easily happen and the user does not even have to know about it. Almost any contact to the outside world now a days requires us to give up a part of our private information, therefore we have to be careful every step of the way to protect out privacy as much as possible.