Social Media and Privacy

Question: Social Media and PrivacyFrom the Newsweek article: When Rape Goes Viral we see that social media is challenging us to confront sexual assault head-on. Unfortunately it is destroying the privacy and lives of victims.Read the article and discuss the privacy implications of social media and dealing with issues like the ones mentioned in the article.

Social media can have both a negative and positive effect on victims dealing with sexual assault. The negative side is that many people can see evidence of the assault. In the Steubenville case many people throughout the community watched this young girl be assaulted because of social media. It’s terrifying to know that people actually had the nerve to post a sexual assault on social media and even scarier that people casually looked at it like any other post. That negative aspect is also a positive though because if more people see the evidence, more people become witnesses and perpetrators will get the charges they deserve. When weighing the pros and cons of social media and sexual assault I would say that it has a more positive effect than negative one. It was stated in the article that 54% of sexual assaults go unreported and perpetrators are often not charged with anything due to lack of evidence. Social media provides a medium for evidence to be posted that previously did not exist. 

I Have Nothing to Hide

Question: When confronted with the issue of dimishing privacy online, some people respond with "I have nothing to hide... so it does not affect me."
What are some reasons that we should all be concerned about privacy and how concerned are you about online privacy?

When people say they have nothing to hide it seems that they mean they are not doing anything illegal. Although this may be true, everyone has personal information on the internet that does need to be hidden. Almost everyone has a banking account of some sort, and their information is stored in files on the internet. Just because one individual isn’t doing anything illegal in their lives, other people are and they could potentially take banking information from people. Personal information goes far beyond banking information. People have their social security numbers online, home addresses, their locations, and although they have nothing illegal to hide, they have information out there that could hurt them in many ways if it falls into the hands of the wrong people. 

I personally am most concerned with the privacy of my Facebook, and information about my location. I, like most people, have nothing to hide but my Facebook has already been hacked twice by people in South Carolina and by another person in the New England area. I got notifications saying that people logged into my account from unfamiliar places which was a bit shocking, but not that hard to believe. I would hate for people to post things that I would not want onto my Facebook page. Another thing I do not like to do is put information about my location at a certain time. I have heard stories about people posting on social media sites about their vacation and come back to a house that had been robbed. Even a simple post like a picture while on vacation can come back to hurt you, and that is upsetting. 

New iPhone 6 Problems

Much of the technological word that we talk about in class is assessable through smartphones. Recently the iPhone 6 was released and this article here highlights a few of the problems people are having with it