Do privacy and confidentiality still exist?
May 13, 2012 in Daily Shoutout, IT and Stuff, Uncategorized
Lately I am asking myself whether privacy and confidentiality still exist. Why I am asking this question, well…it always comes back from my course in Vrije University. And this time it is from Software Architecture course.
In this course, we have to build the architecture of special software which most problem is in its privacy and confidentiality. But then I am thinking again, does it exist?
When I looked around, the social behavior has changed into more public and less private. How can I say such things? Well first, I observed two best social media which are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is even more terrible than twitter because in Facebook everyone else can view your profile, pictures, thought, comment, anything. Especially after it is completed with “timeline” which you can not remove it once you install the timeline.
And the surprise thing is, people just share their information willingly. There is no such pressure or force to share their information even for really private information.
Another example is foursquare. The idea of this application is the user shared their current location information to their social network. In the old days, we usually tried to hide our information to most people if we are going to leave the empty house. The idea behind this is to prevent people to know that the house is left without any companion. Well, you might argue there is such a good security system in the house so you can just leave the house with no companion. But we can also argue that there are a lot of smarter criminal nowadays. 
Btw, that is not the point, my point here is …people just willingly share their current location to everyone. Imagine if there is someone “admire” you badly and then track your location constantly. When there is an opportunity to “meet” you, he or she might “come” to meet you. Or when someone knows that your current location not at home, and then he knows that the home is empty, then he might come to the house and steal some goods from the house. Well, you got the idea, right?
So my question here: Does privacy still exist? Do we need to think about it? Are we totally aware that we are actually sharing our information publicly? Are we totally aware that our data in the internet will not be used for something else?
After reading this post, I hope that everyone will aware that we need to filter the information we want to share and not. Sometimes people argue that the world becomes more open and openness is good because everything is transparent. Well it depends on the context. Sometimes openness is good and sometimes it is not. We need to question ourselves whenever we want to update our information and share it. Once it is out there, it will never come back like before. 
Groetjes van Pink! Happy Thinking!
Image source: http://www.ideaover10.com/social-marketing.html
Well too bad, since I am using jdk1.7 . But don’t worry, it is solvable. We just need to tweak it.
