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Showing posts from April, 2018

What is one to do about protecting our privacy online?

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  89119400-law-concept-burden-of-proof-gavel-in-court-library-.jpg In The Facebook Fallacy: Privacy Is Up to You  NYT journalist, Eduardo Porter, challenges  the claim  Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive,  Mark Zuckerberg, makes that  the social network's use of  providing its users with greater and more transparent controls over the personal data they share could protect its users’ privacy. However, given the latest revelations of the mass amount of information shared without the consent of people who have had their privacy breeched, Zuckerberg's claim  has been proven as bogus.  What, then, is one to do about protecting their privacy online? As Porter says, " Even if we were to know precisely what information companies like Facebook have about us and how it will be used, which we don’t, it would be hard for us to assess potential harms". According to  Professor Acquisti, flipping the burden of proof of privacy regulation from  consumers’ pr

What have we learned about blogging, Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica

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Concerns have been raised this past week by experts  about the amount of information being collected and dispersed by a few giant internet companies  after widespread reports  that U. K. - based Cambridge Analytica used data from more than 50 million Facebook accounts to influence the 2016 USA presidential election.   Folks are also starting to wonder how secure their personal information is on social media networks. News reports  claim that it increasingly depends on where people live and access the web on the planet. Keeping ones privacy online is no longer - and may never have been -  easy, if at all possible.  While there are articles that provide users with advice and guidelines on how to use the internet in ways that protect the personal privacy of users , many people still give away personal information about themselves and often about their children through their blogs and online posts.  At this time of being sensitive to what is being posted online - pediatri

Privacy and Posting and Pictures

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  Privacy and posting and pictures We are learning that our phones and online apps pick up lots of information about us: what we like and what we do—even where we are located and going.    In this post, I’m prepared to take a risk and    post this photograph I recently took (my phone cam knows when!)    I took it while on a walk. I wonder if the computer can pick up my coordinates and know my exact location in this photo. There’s a small figure in the pic—you can see it if you look carefully. Can the computer tell who that is? Questions like this would never have occurred to me last year. I thought we had more freedom to guard our privacy by following some sensible self-censorship. I think we are all learning to fear that once we are hooked into technology, performing with it, everything is open to being known and perhaps exposed.    Having “nothing to hide” has taken on new meaning—rather than meaning we have a clean slate, it seems to say that we literally are left with noth