The Myth of Privacy
We talk about privacy and internet security, but do we really want it? We say we do, but when it really comes down to the crunch, do our actions speaking louder than our words?
To illustrate my point I have embedded a link below to a video recorded on an Edinburgh train last weekend. Fast forward to approximately 1min 10secs.
On Friday night, this young man got on at a train station just outside Edinburgh. The man, said to be 19 did not have a valid ticket, and was asked by the conductor to leave the train. The passenger refuses to move so another passenger offers his assistance to remove him; and does so using force. Personally, it seemed somewhat unnecessary, and a matter for the police rather than an irrelevant man.
What I find even more astonishing is that someone just a few seats away was filming the event in real time. You just can’t get better news reporting than that. This also proves a great argument that social media is relevant, and extremely powerful. The point I am illustrating here is that someone took the time to film this and post it on YouTube, and with over 575,000 views, the video reached its own tipping point that was later picked up by local and national news. Does privacy still exit in our social driven world obsessed with smartphones, Youtube and social networks? Is there really anywhere to hide? The power of social media is immense: everything and anything we do can be caught on camera, at any moment, by anyone.
Source: Sean MacEntee on flickr.com
Just last night I felt the urge to take out my phone and snap a young lad wearing a lion on his head whilst traveling up some escalator inside a cinema. What is behind that urge that drives us to want to snap pictures of random people and post it on a social networking platform like Facebook or Twitter, or in this case YouTube?
Cases like ‘Scotrail no ticket’ is another stark reminder of the world we now live in, which is a lot less private than some would like to believe. Working in social media I read many articles that harper to the tune of privacy, and how important it is to the user and the major companies, but I’m beginning to wonder how much of all that is true.
If we are really so concerned about our privacy on Facebook, and Twitter, which I believe we are and have reason be, then question still lingers, why are we on it? Facebook has more than 800 million active users, and recently broke a world record for achieving over half a billion visitors to their site in just one day. Social networking has grown at a substantial rate over the past five to eight years without a doubt. Twitter has over 300 million registered user, but has become one of the most searched sites for daily news; taking in over 1.6 billion search queries every day, that’s more than Google! Which brings me to my next point; how concerned are companies about our privacy?
Source: DonkeyHotey
If companies are really so interested in protecting users then why all the red tape, which is fed through the fine lines of unread Terms and Conditions? With constant changes being made to social networking platfor
ms; have companies failed to direct users appropriately when it comes to communicating important information and changes that affect users’ privacy? There is an obvious battle between human curiosity and the vulnerability that we all have, which seeks a level of privacy, but can we have both?
We expect companies like Facebook and Google to shield us from the big bad world, but are they really to blame, or are we becoming a product of our own fears? Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said himself that there is still more to be done in the area of privacy. Mr Zuckerberg promised this would be something Facebook would be working on in this next season.
It is worth pointing to the success of Facebook’s Take This Lollipop campaign. This was a campaign launched to raise awareness of security and encourages users to only add and accept people they know and trust. It urges us to be alert and aware of the seriousness of our actions. We must give thought to the things we do both online and offline. As show in the video above, anyone could be watching, tweeting or recording. Your tweets are searchable and unless you mark your Facebook statuses private then your posts are viewable too. So unless you want the world to know don’t do it, tweet it, or post it. Think first, act later.
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