Privacy with new media

Is there such thing as privacy with the media? This article about 300 Facebook community groups being ‘hijacked’ by activists in an effort to expose how vulnerable online reputations are to tampering. The article goes on to say that members of the Facebook groups affected had a warning message posted on their walls. "Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group," the message said. "This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image severly (sic)." CYI also known as control Your Info claims its motives were pure and that the move was more of a "take-over" than a hack, as it involved a loophole with group administrator roles. The activist organization’s website says the Facebook incident is "just one example that really shows the vulnerabilities of social media."

What are the concerns with this issue?

The privacy threats of which people are concerned include:

• Visits to web sites will be tracked secretly.

• E-mail addresses and other personal information will be captured and used for marketing or other purposes without permission.

• Personal information will be sold to third parties without permission.

• Credit card theft

By using cookies, businesses can obtain personal information such as buying habits, e-mail address or the portions of web site that were looked at previously. This information can be combined into mailing lists for direct marketing purposes or it can be sold to third parties (Chung & Paynter, 2002).

In my opinion, the internet is a unsafe place to carry out transactions. This is because there is a lot of loopholes in the systems where people who knows what they are doing can take advantage of it. Unless a person is totally sure of security when doing transactions online, online transactions are not encouraged because they will put your personal data and belongings in danger of being stolen by hackers. 

Reference List:

1)     1)  Couriermail. 2009, ‘Facebook Groups ‘hijacked’ by activists’. http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,,26336076-8362,00.html

2)     2) Chung W. Paynter J. 2002, ‘Privacy issues on the Internet’, School of Business, University of Auckland.