Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy has become an increasingly problematic issue as new media has grown. As I discussed in an earlier post, new media has enabled more information to be made available to the public. With more information comes more challenges to maintain certain information people might regard as private.

Especially in regard to social networking sites privacy is an issue. The problem with these sites is that people agree to share a tremendous amount of personal information with people they consider their friends. For years people had to made the decision of which friends to trust and once in a while a friend would promise not to say something and then say something, breaching the bond of trust. When people post information online the social networking sites they are not only trusting their friends, but also the sites. The sites do a decent job of protecting information relative to the about of information they hold, but there are endless stories of people's information being compromised in one way or another.

One of the most prevalent ways of this happening is in the field of employment. Whether someone is in the interviewing process or employed by a company, the company always wants to know as much as they can about the individual. There have been stories of people being fired or not hired as a result of something the company found out about them online. While safeguards have been put in place to stop this from happening, it still occurs. The ideal solution would be to increase morality in society so no one will look at anything they are not supposed to, but that is far from happening.