Are you one of the many people today that have fear of being under some sort of surveillance, fear of government intrusion, worry over companies tracking your purchases, or technology such as Mobile GPS tracking your physical movements and then automatically posting your status updates on internet web sites similar to www.ping.fm ?
Needless-to-say, some profound choices now confront the American people -”The end of privacy is the end of second chances,” – states Larry Ponemon’s (privacy consulting firm -The Ponemon Institute.), and not to be out done, the Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen claims – “we are our own Wikileakers,” providing a telling snapshot of life today.
With the Internet evolving at near break neck speed, it becomes challenging to maintain a personal comfort zone on the world wide web these days. Those ridiculous internet tubes could be said to be in a perpetual circle jerk. So an individual must have a renewed perspective to be privacy wise 24/7… and yeah sure – that’s difficult on many levels! Since the most popular social web sites today are where many congregate to have fun, chat, post their favorite pictures – that’s exactly where the paradox lies. Privacy is usually the last thing people are thinking about while enjoying these popular social sites. But it should be! Face Book comes to mind…
There is strong evidence that people’s attitudes towards privacy have become polarized.
When The Ponemon Institute (a privacy consulting firm) asked a representative sample of 700 people, if they cared more, less or about the same about privacy today compared to five years ago – they got a surprising response. Exactly the same percentage 36 percent thought it was important, the same as those that did not, with the balance in the middle, with not much of a opinion – The expected majority response is usually found – in the middle which is why the surprise.
In retrospect – MSNBC surveyed people 5 years ago about privacy issues – where 60% of responders stated that they thought privacy was slipping away and that it bothered them.
But in the same breath, research shows that people nearly always engage in what’s called an “optimism bias ” ― those awful things I’ve heard about couldn’t possibly happen to me.
In economics, it’s called an “externality” ― the costs of your choices go up because of factors that have nothing to do with you. On the Internet, it’s called the network effect!
Furthermore, many also may suffer from an “illusion of control” over their personal information ― an illusion that’s been cultivated by numerous internet firms, including Face Book, when founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently stated – “The site has actually never worked in a way that you sign up and the only people who can see you or your information were your friends,” he said. ‘The reason for that is … if only the people who were already your friends on the site could see your information then it would be really difficult to connect with your actual friends and actually be able to have meaningful interactions with them.” …”People use the service because they love sharing information.”
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