Build Your Personality

At the RSA Security Europe Conference in the UK, personal privacy was brought to the front of people's conscience. It was argued that society and communication has changed forever, which will have a bad effect on people's privacy levels. Decades ago, communication was typically done on the phone or face to face. Now, a lot of communication is carried out through email and/or online. This will create a saved copy of all correspondence.

Trashing an email does not necessarily delete it. The receiver or sender still has a copy on their email account. Increasingly, giant data centres make it easier than ever to store online correspondence. It is argued that inexpensive technology costs and increasing memory hard drives mean that data storage and collection is now more possible than it was some years ago.

You might be wondering why it matters so much, but private data is the same as money and having access to lots of private personal data will often mean companies can make more profit from advertising. On an everyday level, this is often seen while registering for something new, with those 'please select here if you do not want to have any correspondence from the company'; this happens offline as well. Furthermore, how many customers read the terms of agreement and privacy policies for the computer applications we use or the sites that we visit? It may end up being astonishing to study a few of them and realize just what the program is allowed to do with the collected data.

Facebook continues to be derided for its complicated privacy settings and not being transparent. It is totally possible for people to read just about all the details on somebody's profile if they haven't enabled particular privacy settings. While the safety conscience amongst us will ensure to set the privacy settings accordingly, many people tend not to know they are exposing themselves to possible cyber crime and identity theft. It's not simply sufficient to argue that it is the user's problem if their level of privacy becomes compromised. Moreover, companies shouldn't desire to deceive customers on purpose so as to facilitate less difficult data collection.

Google was also under a lot of social and political complaints pertaining to its collection of private wi-fi data when gathering data as a part of its StreetView service. Google effectively listened in to people's Internet connections and saved private and personal data. Google's blas reply upset lots of people and lots of governments were drawn into the debate challenging the legality of Google's actions.

The more private information a company has on you, the more they can charge companies in order to target you. If a company knows that you are female, aged between 30-40 and have three kids, then advertisers will be willing to pay more because they can target their advertisements more efficiently. If an advert is targeted at the proper consumer then the advertisers will have more results. Marketers may be willing to pay more since then they could target with toy advertisements, home improvement advertisements, kitchen advertisements and so on, as opposed to advertisements for extreme sports or weight lifting (although these are big generalizations).

Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that you have read the privacy policies accurately. Everytime you sign up for something you are signing a contract. It would be horrible to imagine one ill-judged sign up for a site could result in anything bad many years later. You should always read the terms, it may be clichd but it just might save you from sticky outcomes. Additionally, you should always keep good net safety practices. Owning a good password is a good step but you could also use a password keeper which will increase your security a lot! You can save passwords to a site and keep them safe and secure.