Description
This paper is about privacy. We now store some of our most personal information in what might be deemed a public space, the nebulous world of “the cloud,” and the giant servers of the social media corporations. We have seen how vulnerable this information is with the numerous breaches in the past couple of years, such as the hack on the Ashley Madison site and the leaking of nude photos of celebrities. A couple of years ago there was also a lot of focus on the information that the government was collecting and storing via the NSA. But I want our privacy paper this time to focus on social media.
• Is there something inherently good about privacy, something worth preserving, that we might be losing in all of this? Is privacy more important than ever, or less so?
• Have we fundamentally changed our concept of what is private and public since the explosive growth of social media?
• Most of you are well aware of the privacy level of the various social media that you may or may not be using, but how much of this awareness is present in the general population? Do those who are less computer literate than you realize how much of themselves they are sharing?
• Will or should the government have a role in the regulation of social media and its intrusion into our lives, particularly now that the integrity of our elections has come under attack?
• Might all of this lead to a different sense of who we are? Are we already different?
Do some research for this paper and cite at least two sources besides our text. You may also include personal stories from your own experiences with social media, and of course your own reflections on these topics. (You may use the set of Time articles that I have posted to our Blackboard in the Supplemental Readings section as one of your sources.)