Can technology really change the world?

One laptop a day...
will that really make a huge difference in peoples lives?
would it be more important than food, shelter, clothes?
yes education is important..thats the only way to get yourself out of poverty..but how worthy is a laptop when your too weak from starvation to use it...
Negroponte has a point in trying to civilize and educate third world countires..but I would have to take Winstons side in this case.. yes technology is important but I would not classify it under a basic neccesity...
being a SST activist (this basically means that technology changes due to social needs, therefore it is not technology which changes us and technology is not a product of our society like technological determinist's assume)
I would have to agree with this concept...yes technology is important in our lives but we must also not forget that we are the reason why theres technology in the first place we play a MAJOR role in why technology is so advanced in the world we live in.
This makes the Marxist view a lot more appealing, it is true that people around the world benefit on behalf of those that suffer through exploitation and free labour the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
We are living in a society where we think that technology is so important in our everyday lives...we are made to believe that we can not function without it however in truth we are living in a superfical world and at the end of the day money can't buy all your hearts desires (also ideals from the Frankfurt School for social research).
This brings us to another point Google and Privacy?
there have been many moral arguments around Google's right to information online..who's property is it and who has the right to that property?
moral judgements would suggest that no one is allowed to use another persons property without permission of the provider while others would say that information online has become so normalised and once it is posted or put online it officially becomes public property.
I would have to agree with the second idea... at the end of the day google has made people more aware of other peoples websites, information, even books...yes that can be a bad thing sometimes but in reality it can also be a good thing..for e.g. google books which provide users online the oppurtunnity to flip through snippets of the book online, this can encourage users to go out and buy the book which is the case on my behalf on numerous occasions.
Lastly is the idea of downloads such as films and music..
Everyone has to admit that they have downloaded something for free over the internet, whether its an mp3 song, a film or even an entire album we all fall victim to the appealing notion of free downloads. So is downloading a song online the equivalent of going into a store and stealing a physical item??
In a way yes it is.. the creative individuals involved backstage do deserve to get rewarded for their hard work (as RIAA have stated, it is the creative people involved who are being stripped from their rights, the record company comes 2nd however this is because it is the artist who does most of the work at the end of the day)
so is downloading free media online bad? in reality yes it is but will that stop people from doing it? I highly doubt it..the internet allows individuals to do almost anything which can be detrimental to those putting great amounts of effort into their work.... However I do know a lot of people who will download the song free first and buy it from iTunes later if they like the track.

Freemium Facebook

What features of Facebook (existing or potential) would you be prepared to pay for?

   

I did some soul searching of my thrifty self and the conclusion I came to centred on privacy.  For the majority of members of the Internet generation who have come to equate ‘online content’ with ‘free’, any measures to implement a pay system for content that can easily be shared or transferred simply does not work.  You say I have to pay to view the full text of this news article?  No problem! Google can easily point me in the direction of another news website which has published this article for free.  Similarly, while it has been suggested that premium video or photo editing tools embedded within Facebook would be worthwhile ‘user pays’ features, I personally would be most likely to forgo the added convenience in favour of continuing to utilise free third party software.  However, should Facebook require me to purchase the right to alter the default privacy settings (something no other provider can offer me), then I would seriously reconsider my ‘Facebook-is-free’ mindset ... particularly in light of concerns surrounding the newly released Facebook Places (with a default privacy setting allowing your friends to check you in to any place at any time) which other bloggers have commented on.

Paying for privacy is no newfangled notion.  Certainly, people have (happily?) exchanged money for unlisted phone numbers, tall fences and curtains at home, even Swiss bank accounts!  Yet, there is conflicting evidence over whether people are prepared to pay for privacy within the online domain.  For example, while one study on online shopping found that participants were likely to purchase a product from a merchant that requested a greater degree of sensitive personal information than another in order to save as little as one Euro, a different study concluded that people were in fact willing to pay a higher price in order to protect their privacy (albeit, on average, only 60 cents more per $15 of value).  With contemporary preoccupations with privacy as a right, I suppose the question really becomes whether charging users for this right is a legitimate business model (and a sign of things to come), or an exercise in extortion.

danah boyd and the facebook news feed.

danah boyd’s reading highlighted some issues for me about Facebook. Firstly I find Facebook as a useful tool to allow social behaviour between connections with people that would have otherwise not have existed or would have cease to exist in the first place. Secondly it is a great way for me to plan events, get invitations to events, join causes and see updates on pages that I have interest in. Facebook is like a social hobby. In this way I forget about its privacy functions or ‘lack thereof’.
I find this interesting in relation to dannah boyd’s argument that news feeds popped the privacy bubble that people thought they had on a social networking forum like Facebook. All of your activity would appear in a communal news feed among your friends, which made it easier for people to ‘keep tabs’ on you and see your associations and revelations about yourself. She mentioned that this scared people at first and that without the ability to ‘rank’ Facebook friends in accordance with the depth of the relationship, people became anxious about utilising the complete social networking tool that is Facebook. She also mentions that because we have such an overload of data flow constantly appearing in our news feed, and the mass of data we comprehend about our Facebook friends, via news feeds, gives us a sense of false intimacy with these people.
I half heartedly agree with her. News feeds have always been common place in the time I’ve been using Facebook, so I guess the factor of a ‘lack of privacy’ doesn’t register. It is part of the norm. In all honesty, half of my Facebook interaction comes from engaging with my news feed, so in all essence I would be a dull and introverted Facebook user without it. I also find that in knowing Facebook is a public network, I subconsciously correct and screen my information and posts before sending them- nothing that is explicitly personal or socially incriminating- therefore news feeds are not really a privacy issue.
What I do agree with is that news feeds, and the abundance of information you can receive from them, does allow you to be more ‘personally engaged’ with your friends; which is oxymoronic as there is nothing personal about Facebook. I guess it is because these people and their activity are constantly appearing, you feel this sense of a ‘personal connection’. Almost as if the tabs are being kept for you by Facebook. I see how this is a worrying factor in regards to Facebook applications. So in relation to a false sense of personal relationship acquired by the news feed application, I find dannah boyd has an interesting and somewhat truthful point.
Source:
Boyd, d. (2008) ‘Facebook’s privacy trainwreck: exposure, invasion and social convergence’ in Convergence,Vol 14(1): 13-20. Course Reader.

Privacy on SNS

As we live in the digital age, people pay more attention to the privacy on the internet and social network sites such as facebook in particular. From the reading ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck’, Danah Boyd mentioned that “News Feeds” on Facebook made aggregating information more accessible and visible to everyone and pointed out how this new feature expose information in public. But, as long as you control privacy how much and what you are going to share, I don’t think this new feature is a big problem as a privacy loss.

I have an account on Facebook and whenever I log in to facebook, News feed provides me information about what my friends have been up to and with whom they accepted as “friend” lately which helps me keep tabs on them. Usually I use facebook only to interact with friends I already know, and I don’t want to all the materials and information I share with them to be available for anyone to see. So I checked my privacy settings on facebook and made sure that all materials I have on SNS is only available to me and my friends.

I guess many people fear of what other people may think of their actions on facebook or on any other SNS. If people don’t want to lose their privacy and not get embarrassed, they may need to check their facebook for any inappropriate postings and also untag themselves from the drunken photos.

To sum up, I think it is our responsibility to limit and control personal information on the internet. SNS user should control their own privacy settings and more cautions should be taken when they posting some personal details on internet.

Privacy and FB

Is there a private life in our online communities?

if there is, how private would it be?

I was lingering on Facebook (oh yes AGAIN) and i was wondering should i change my privacy settings. but as i was looking through it, i found it quite tricky. It gave me the option of disclose certain informations about myself to either my friends, everyone, friends of friends and even the 'other' option that allows you to customize your privacy setting. If we look at it closely and think about it, all these options doesn't really help in maintaining your privacy. One of the most amazing?stupid?tricky? part of Facebook is the friend request option. I was looking at it the other day and found out that Facebook have automatically requested some strangers to be my friend without my authorization. If i didn't found out about this the other day, that stranger might have been my 'friends' and all my informations will be disclose to a total stranger.

To be honest, i do not believe that there is this sense of privacy on any online social networks. For me, the whole point of joining a social network is to disclose some of my informations, and sharing it with my friends and family. With this in mind, i would not be constantly thinking of whether my information will leak out to somewhere else or not, because if it ever happens, i am kind of expected it to be.

Whatever we choose to post on our profile in a social network site, it does not only limited to our friends and family. These information can be easily track down by some other people. One of the current trend that i am seeing on Facebook is the commercial aspect of it, and how it manipulate the informations network in Facebook. Some people actually created a profile and start selling their products. Well that sounds perfectly fine, but the thing is, they tagged people in their pictures so that other people around the people who got tagged will get notified. From this we can see the chain effect of Facebook, on how informations are disclosed and pass down. These people who are trying to sell something on Facebook also tend to hack into other people's account and start changing their profile pictures into their products' images without the users' consent.

By choosing to put our information online, and displaying them to the world, at that stage, we already choose to chuck part of our privacy away. Of course we can control and filter what sort of informations we want the others to know, but we cannot exactly expect that all our informations will be kept with us safe and sound.

I reckon, the only way to protect our privacy is to either not disclosing our informations online at all, or filter the ones you do not wish to publish and kept them somewhere real safe (which sadly, there isn't such thing yet online).

Privacy in the 21st century?

We are living in a world, where public and private spaces have been blurred by technology.
Technology brought people the new era, where life was promised to be a much better place to live, but it seems like we have exchanged privacy with technology.

From mobile phones to social networking sites, we are constantly monitoring other people and we a monitored by others. We log on to Facebook to catch up with our friends where we can see pictures of our friends and comments made by them, we receive texts and phone calls from our friends and family. Privacy is no longer active in the world where we are living and breathing because we are constantly in surveillance by the people that are around us.
When we go to supermarket for example we might see a coupon saying 20% off a product and all we need were to give up a few of our personal information to get that discount coupon. Marketers have learned how to seduce consumers with discounts and it shows how vulnerable people are in giving out its personal information.

Tools for tracking people which once was used by the government in the past but now in the digital age large corporations have access to these tools. With the constant development in the digital age the word privacy is becoming more and more irrelevant and the world public is becoming more relevant.

Privacy of the Public

With the topic of privacy over the past week, we've talked a couple of times about CCTV and its recorded monitoring of public locations. I know that this is quite a contested issue, that some feel this is an invasion of privacy that does not warrant the security it offers. Regardless, CCTV is widespread, and overall people accept that they will be monitored in many public places.

This got me thinking about how privacy is so dependent upon location, and furthermore, how this relates to privacy online. Physical locations explicitly define the public from the private: CCTVs are acceptable on the street, but definitely not inside the home. Of course online (specifically SNS), what is public and what is private isn't so defined as there is no traditional sense of location. Danah Boyd (from the set reading) talks about this 'grey area' of information privacy online: much of what is posted online is not private, but it is assumed that it will only be read by certain people.

On Facebook, for example, friends can comment on other friend's walls, but the comment reaches further people through news feeds, as well as being viewable by anyone with access to the wall. Just who a wall post will reach is actually pretty much unknown to the commenter, being dependent on a combination of privacy settings, friends lists, and networks. Sure there are privacy settings, but short of limiting all content to "friends only", privacy quickly becomes a murky term.

Facebook 'Places' is an interesting complication. To me, the idea seems to be a sort of combination of CCTV and SNS; the Facebook Places user can be tagged and their physical location shared (monitored). A part of me believes that (just like with CCTV) while in public locations, I can't expect my actions to be completely private. Yet the thought of being tagged on Facebook Places, and my location being traceable across online networks is somewhat unsettling. In a sense, this becomes another grey area of privacy: the knowledge of my location is public, but I also want some degree of privacy and control over this information.

Again, it seems Facebook is not only pushing the boundaries of privacy, but also pushing the boundaries of public information.

Tinfoil Hats: Privacy Haute Couture

The tinfoil hat is the hallmark of a conspiracy theorist. With the background-level paranoia surrounding the Facebook privacy settings, I'm considering making one myself. The designer ones are such a rip off. Old-school conspiracy theorists believed that the government had a file on absolutely everyone, kept somewhere like Area 52.

Area 51 is for amateurs.

But now we willingly upload a whole heap of stuff willingly, free to be perused by just about everyone. The government doesn't have to do a thing: its all there - tagged, bagged and open for business. And people complain about privacy? Facebook isn't exactly the digital equivalent of a Swiss bank. My account got hacked the other day. Luckily my Facebook account doesn't include any vital information, like my bank account details. But I'm broke anyway, so that doesn't matter.

Privacy isn't a right - it's a strategy. Look at your Facebook privacy settings: they're not sophisticated but they work well enough. If you don't want to be tagged in embarrassing photos, change your settings! Or untag yourself. If you don't want to have your Mum or your boss finding out about that guy/girl/??? you woke up next to in bed last Saturday, don't add them! Or don't post about it, either works. Your profile only has as much stuff as you put in it. Yes, you can find out who's been looking at your profile but unless you're particularly paranoid, it doesn't matter that much.

If a teenager can hack into the Pentagon mainframe, Facebook doesn't stand a damn chance. When you close your profile, just ask them to wipe your info. You do have a right to do that. Same applies to MySpace, which is like the AUT of social networking.

Like I said, privacy is a strategy. Everyone has a digital footprint, and some people have bigger shoes than others. If you don't want people to tread on your private little Facebook toes, don't give them the opportunity to.

Personally, I wear heels.

Facebook, PANIC! Really?

As with most new technologies, there seems to be a moral panic around the implications the social network site Facebook has and is having on our social behaviour. Boyd’s reading is very convincing and the points he makes are true as I can see from my experience as a facebook user. For Example, the news feeds on facebook do allow more exposure to one’s personal details more easily and this does concern me as alot of the groups that I see some people join on facebook I do pass judgement on. Also some of the status updates that people declare on facebook are shocking as some are so personal and if I am not that close with them it does alter the way I view them. This does seem serious, especially if people have employers or parents as friends as I think some things should be private, and the way we interact with some people should be different from others. Evidently, I do believe Boyd does have a good point that it’s scary how all social contexts all emerge into one on facebook. However, when applying his argument to my own engagement with facebook I cannot relate. To me Facebook is a public place so I do not write personal status updates and if I do I do think carefully about what I post. In contrast if I was at home talking with my family or with my close friends I really would say anything personal and talk freely. Mark Zuckerberg is being portrayed as such a powerful evil person, but in reality we are in control of how we define what is private not him. We do have the right to privacy I believe because to me privacy is almost like freedom, in the public sphere we are controlled to act in certain ways by different institutions and certain norms which are in place. Within the private sphere there is less control and we are given more freedom and I think this is important. Zuckerberg does say that Facebook is following the trends within society to become more public giving examples such as twitter and reality television, however I’m exposed to all these and still appreciate my privacy. Overall, privacy is a personal choice and I do concur with Boyd by saying it is up to us whether privacy is something we want. Not Zuckerberg.

Incognito?

So, "you've gone incognito"...Or have you?


If you read the small warning when you first open Incognito mode, you'll see a brief outline telling you that Google Incognito doesn't actually protect you from very much at all-- I think it's safe to assume however that most people will ignore that warning.


It seems safe to say that what Incognito mode is protecting your from is anyone on your computer snooping around, checking up on sites you've been visiting. Effectively, this protects you from anyone you share a computer with finding out that you've been looking at private material online.


What isn't Incognito protecting you from?
Pretty much everything else.


Here's a small list of everything that can still record and store information about you and your web searches and browsing (according to Google itself):

• The websites you visit in Incognito mode can still record your visit and store information about you. Having said this, Google Incognito does rid you of any traces or cookies the site may leave on your computer, but everything you do on the site is still known to them.
• Anything you download can still store informationa about you, and malware can still infiltrate your computer.
• Your ISP can still store information about your web browsing. Information that they can hand over, as we have learned in tutorials, to any Government officials that ask for it.
• Following on from this, Government agencies can still store, and get information about you and your web browsing history.
• Finally, Incognito doesn't protect you from Google itself. If you sign into your Google account whilst using Incognito mode, from then on Google will store all of your searches and webpages visited.

So, while Google Incognito might keep you safe from anyone else with access to your computer finding out about the sites you've been visiting, it actually doesn't keep you safe from anyone looking to gain and store information about you or your web browsing history.


It seems those "surprises" you might be planning in Incognito aren't that secret after all.

Ethical Issues around mobile privacy

From Lookout, a mobile privacy "watchblog" some alarming privacy statistics for mobile applications:

• 29% of free applications on Android have the capability to access a user’s location, compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone

• Nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access user’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%)

• 47% of free Android apps include third party code, while that number is 23% on iPhone * third party code enables custom ads to be served and/or analytic behaviour tracking.

A user's location, call history and personal contact list is highly sensitive data, as opposed to web cookies stored in your browser. It's only bound to increase drastically over time. Here are a few "topics" to consider:

1. What implications does this have for mobile phone users? How about for advertisers and mobile providers?
2. Does this affect your opinion of favorite iPhone or Android apps -- in particular free ones? Should mobile app developers take it upon themselves to help reverse this trend?
3. How can we as users of this technology stop this violation of privacy? Through government, our purchasing decisions, or both?