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 Privacy is no longer active in the world where we are living and breathing because we are constantly in surveillance by the people that are around us.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.

The development of technology on Mobile phones

The new generation of mobile phones contain new developments of technology such as:

1. Wireless technology
   
2. Office technology
   
3. Adobe
   
4. image, sound and video editor

As technology develops the ways people communicate also develops. The mobile phone went from talking and txting to internet calling, facebook communication on mobile phones, emails and standard office application for people on the go.


The development of these technology are aimed at businessmen but more teenagers actually have these technology, who know how to use it while the businessmen use less of the features provided on the phones. The technology has just become an object to show their status as they still only use calling and txting the most on their mobile phones. Many of the older generation has even found it hard to find the menu button on a nokia smartphone.


The development of technology have been a waste in my personal view as, as the teenager just use them for fun while the older generation don't know how to use it, hence having all these features on the mobile phone that eats up alot of the battery is a waste for development of technology.


Have you say....

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?

Mobile Phones.... Who needs them??

"what would it take to persuade me to live without a mobile phone for 6 months?"

Oh it would take almost nothing to persuade me to live without my mobile phone for 6 months, I despise the thing! I don't know how anyone else feels about their beloved mobile phone (or phones depending on the person, I know a lot of people have more then one) but I just don't get this almost obsessive need to have a mobile phone everywhere they go. I need mine for work and emergencies for the most part, and I fully admit I am one of those horrible people who gets a text message but wont reply for a week or so, and when I do reply it is almost always a one or two word answer. But just having to cart the thing around on top of everything else I need for uni, work or even just going down to the shops to buy milk, well to be frank it bugs me.

I like being able to leave the house and no one contact me or demand anything of me. It's part of the reason I left the house to begin with.... It's mostly the obsessive checking if I'm having a conversation with someone that I really dislike the most. It's like the person in question doesn't have enough respect for you to give you their full attention. And now they don't just make phone calls, you can surf the web, send emails, check out other peoples facebook pages and about a dozen other things that can distract you from whats going on right in front of you. Give it a couple of years and they will be able to also make your dinner and bath the dog for you.

But despite my complaining a mobile phone does have it's upside (and yes I admit this begrudgingly) if your car breaks down or you've forgotten the grocery list then it can, in fact be a lifesaver, and if you want to cheat at a pub quiz then a phone with internet access is certainly the way to go. And parents can stay in constant contact with their kids no matter where they are in the world to see if they are getting into trouble or not.... wait, is that a good thing? I suppose it depends on if you like your kids or not...

Mobile phone a good thing?

The developments of communications technology has resulted in the invention of the mobile phone. It has become an essential part of our daily lives and majority of people rely on this small communication devices to contact with one another and you always carry this device around where ever you go. We can choose to live without it but in the age of digital era communication without mobile phone is unthinkable. Since we rely so much on these devices, we keep getting constant texts and calls from our friends and relatives and we also reply back to them because if we don’t, they might ask questions like why didn’t you reply back? Are you ok? Now the frustrating part starts to kick in, owning a mobile phone can be frustrating because we constantly have to give out our numbers to basically everyone we know. It a bother and I often think is it voluntary or involuntary and is it necessary to give out numbers? Sometimes when you want to be alone you wish that mobile phones weren’t invented because with the device it seems that privacy doesn’t exist. Only thing you could say to your friends if you want to ignore them is telling them the battery was flat so you couldn’t reply back or saying u were busy, which seems like a lame excuse. You don’t want to say I ignored it because I couldn’t be bothered to reply back, you have to explain it and make sure that it ends in a good way or else they might think you’re ignorant. Friends expect you to reply back to their SMS and phone calls because if you don’t then they always think something has happened, and all you wanted to do is just having a time of your own.

I can divide mobile phones usage into three different categories personal, social and professional. Mobile phones is supposed to be personal and professorial use but nowadays its mainly concentrated on the social use which makes it frustrating as half of the times, you have to keep replying back to your friends. You can’t use it when you want to use it and where ever you want to use it, as social use has overtaken the personal and professional use.