Privacy

There seems to have no 100 percent privacy protection in this digital information age. Facebook who is one of the biggest social media network promises its users to continue to improve their security protection, to give users more control on who they want to share their personal posts such as pictures. However, even the founder of Facebook, Zuckerberg's holiday family picture is not entirely protected against third parties when it is intended to be shared within the family circle. Which it raises the question, how can we ensure that our privacy is protected against unauthorized usage, or even to securely prevent from identify thief and other information leakage?

To understand privacy in the digital information age, we need to understand the function of the Internet. Since its early usage, according to the GNU project and the Free Software movement, the Internet started as an open source where information and technical accesses are meant to made free to use to anyone find the tools useful, and it allows users to make changes to better suite each users, as well as to continue to improve and develop the system. In other words, the Internet is initially meant to be an open project allowing anyone who understands the coding sources to build on the creative ways to make the system useful. It wasn't created on the bases to store personal privacy, rather, it is created to be a platform where its users are free to contribute and share their creativity and findings.

Until e-commerce came along, the Internet becomes the platform to money making for businesses. As the digital era blooms, businesses dominate the creative usage of the Internet. It becomes the platform where businesses are connected globally, resulting in a global digital economy where businesses maximize income with little amount of investment. Which brings us to storing consumers' private information such as credit card information for electronic purchases, as well as information such as social security, online personal behavior patterns, birthdays, physical addresses and etc.. Businesses collect such information for their own benefits at the beginning, and later on these information become extremely valuable in helping companies generate more business. One thing lead to another, new business model exist to make money by selling these valuable privacy information to each other without notifying the consumers to what usage the private information are for.

As mentioned, the Internet's initial purpose is to create an opened, shared, and free software system to the public for creative usage and the possibility to improve the system in the long run. Reed Daniel ends his article with the question that "in a digital world where images, video and text can proliferate globally in seconds, we need to rethink what "possession" means". Rather to discuss the issues of privacy and how it is related to new media, we should think about the purpose of the Internet and how it is being used today that changed the purpose of this platform overtime.