A local high school recently blocked the popular location-based social networking site Foursquare and both students using the service. The students claim that they had just recently signed up for Foursquare and were only blocked after using it on school computers for about 5 days or so. Many other ventures the students had taken were soon blocked by the on-campus technical staff. The students are up in arms over the lack of ability to now check in at school.
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Thursday, March 25, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
Privacy in the Digital Age: Is it worth it?
We're all afraid that someone might find out what we're doing. What are you doing? Well, that's the question, isn't it? With so many places where we can update our "status," nothing is really kept private anymore. Although, we have very specific settings where we can allow only specific people to see, so in a sense, we can create somewhat of a false status. Not many people are brutally honest about what is going on in their life currently; that is just human nature. It seems like the more outlets we have to give out personal information in a novel and trendy fashion, the more likely we are to almost beg for everything to be labelled TMI. Now, I've been a frequent user of twitter since April of 2009 and just signed up for foursquare. Those who are without sin...
Now, the point was recently raised that it may be good for all of our personal information to be out there and accessible. If someone suddenly becomes ill without a hint of notice, wouldn't it be useful to know exactly what the patient was doing the past 24 hours? Google has already indexed the internet; it would be nice for someone to index our lives. I know that not everyone trusts Google as much as a lot of people (myself included) do, so who should get the power? Google is one of a few companies that has shown itself to be trustworthy, but not everyone wants their entire life to be in the hands of a powerful corporation. For all records to be kept up-to-date, they would need to be able to sync with some sort of cloud server, which would have to be moderated meaning that your information would be visible to that person. It would also need to be able to sync with every sort of social media site out there to index our lives completely. Who needs a crummy photo album? In theory, you could set up your own server, have a document or set of documents with all of your records kept safely and privately and update them from the server as frequently as possible, but most people won't even keep track of a dietary journal unless absolutely necessary.
The problem is that people are afraid of someone knowing what they are up to. If you are really worried about what you're doing, maybe you shouldn't be doing it to begin with. Then again, there are a lot of creeps hanging out on the internet waiting for someone to slip up and give out their location, but maybe it's worth giving up a little privacy so that our physicians can figure out our mystery illness. If there were a safe and easy enough way to keep track of our entire lives, it could change the world. This is just the first stop on the way to tweeting toilets.
Now, the point was recently raised that it may be good for all of our personal information to be out there and accessible. If someone suddenly becomes ill without a hint of notice, wouldn't it be useful to know exactly what the patient was doing the past 24 hours? Google has already indexed the internet; it would be nice for someone to index our lives. I know that not everyone trusts Google as much as a lot of people (myself included) do, so who should get the power? Google is one of a few companies that has shown itself to be trustworthy, but not everyone wants their entire life to be in the hands of a powerful corporation. For all records to be kept up-to-date, they would need to be able to sync with some sort of cloud server, which would have to be moderated meaning that your information would be visible to that person. It would also need to be able to sync with every sort of social media site out there to index our lives completely. Who needs a crummy photo album? In theory, you could set up your own server, have a document or set of documents with all of your records kept safely and privately and update them from the server as frequently as possible, but most people won't even keep track of a dietary journal unless absolutely necessary.
The problem is that people are afraid of someone knowing what they are up to. If you are really worried about what you're doing, maybe you shouldn't be doing it to begin with. Then again, there are a lot of creeps hanging out on the internet waiting for someone to slip up and give out their location, but maybe it's worth giving up a little privacy so that our physicians can figure out our mystery illness. If there were a safe and easy enough way to keep track of our entire lives, it could change the world. This is just the first stop on the way to tweeting toilets.
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