Privacy Problems Within Social Websites

Unit 4 Assignment

Razidi Wallace

IT190: Foundations in Information Technology

Professor Kurt Bradquist

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Although it hasn’t been rendered as an illegal use of computers and there’s still just a lot of people that aren’t aware of how email companies, search engines and other free online sources use their personal data when they sign up and use they use their product, my ethical issue is for the privacy of personal information. The right to exist privately is sadly a more reasonable request when you don’t have a computer and aren’t involved in the social networking tools of web 2.0. Email and internet browser companies such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, Internet Explorer, Firefox and various others sell their users information from their searches and emails to third parties for large profits and that’s why they can provide these email and browser services for no cost to it’s users. There’ a cost, but that price is hidden from the general public.

One of the most recent outbursts of personal information that has been taken from unsuspecting users/members from an online website is Facebook.com, which is a social networking website that has millions of users and all of their information stored within their databases. After Facebook was exposed for this, they put out an announcement to notify everyone including all of it’s users on January, 2013 that they will be sharing user’s information, which includes home addresses and telephone numbers that have been stored within account profiles. (Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. May, 2013) This goes to show us all that we aren’t safe on the sites that we spend the most time on just to relax and socialize with friends and family. If Facebook didn’t get exposed by leaking information that they weren’t supposed to, this announcement would of never been made and they would just be doing it as sneakily as they had been in the past.

Although Facebook may be one of the more famous companies takig...