How does privacy and confidentiality relate to new media?
Simple, if you have a Facebook, Twitter and/or MySpace profile and you make it available for everyone to see, well, you have no privacy. I am being a bit facetious, but there is truth to my statement.
I shall use a simple analogy (using social networking sites) to better explain what I mean: Think of your Facebook, Twitter and/or MySpace profile as a window to your bedroom. If you pull your window’s shade up, everything you do, say, or have in your room is visible to the people outside. If you pull down the shade, the things that go on in your room are no longer visible to the people outside, only to those you trust enough to bring inside your room.
I use social networking sites for my example because they are the more commonly used forms of new media and people have a tendency to post a lot of personal information and photos on their social networking profiles. However, like closing a window shade to hide things that go on in your bedroom, you can hide your profile from certain people so you are still able to maintain privacy. Or, you can make your profile public and not post anything you consider too personal (duh!).
For other forms of new media, perhaps email or online banking, confidentiality and privacy can and are maintained by using tools such as SSL (secure socket layering). SSL is an encryption method that, usually, makes data you send encrypted to those who do not have the proper viewing privileges (you usually see “https://” when SSL is being used on websites).
Once again going back to my analogy for social networking sites, if you make your data accessible to anyone (i.e. keeping your window shade pulled up), you should not expect your data/information to be private or confidential. And going back to the original question, privacy and confidentiality relate to new media as much as they relate to anything else in the world—if you want something kept private, you find ways to keep it private.
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