Online Privacy vs Publicity

Privacy is a right that we take for granted. We hope to keep our business to ourselves, and we have all kinds of safeguards and protective measures to protect it that way. We make tall walls and fences and live behind locked door. We use safes, banks, safety deposit boxes and other various methods to keep our personal items and information private. But are these conventional physical methods adequate anymore? Are they even helpful? The information age has arrived and with it our definitions of privacy may need to be rewritten.

In any facet of modern society, the most valuable assets you can have to be information. No matter what kind of activities you’re involved in, you can be certain that the right kind of information exchange matter very much. Today, it is not just enough to be your self, you have to be yourself and make a name for your self, if you are to be succeeded. To do this, you have to share certain thing about yourself. For the average person, this phenomenon is most obvious in the social arena, especially in the social networking arena. Facebook, Twitter, hi5 and other social oriented sites are the way to interact with the people. Let’s face it, if you are a tech savvy urban dweller; the first thing you do, is probably search him or her on facebook. Sites like are a treasure trove of personal information of individuals. Most people have posted details on these sites that they would not dare reveal on real life. What they do not relies is that putting thing on social networking sites is potentially just as public as saying it out loud. Websites are public by nature, so you should never put any thing you want to keep secret, online at all. Many of our services are fast moving online, and online services will always require a certain amount of personal data in order to authenticate the user. But as users, we must always make certain that we have to control over the information we provide. As much publicized example was when Facebook used photos of one of its users in an advertising campaign, without that user’s knowledge. It turned out that, because of the lack of knowledge of Facebook privacy settings, the user has unwittingly authorized the uses of photo.

The thing to do hare is to be aware of situation. Online privacy is highly subjective, and it takes time and experiences to properly understand. For example, the same rule to do not apply to your online banking and your social site. They are two completely different things, and you give them completely different level of information and whether alright with that. Always give as little information as you can, because it is safer that way, till you know ho to handle your online privacy.