Tag Archives: privacy

The Illusion of Privacy

Supposedly private photo on Facebook

If you use Facebook, shop on Amazon, or blog, you’ll definitely benefit from reading this blog. Please share with others whose well-being you care about.

A brief example: A few years ago I ran a survey about privacy on Facebook. Over 90% of the respondents (both genders, across all ages) responded that privacy is important to them. However, their actions contrasted sharply with this concern. By merely responding to my survey, they had agreed to provide me access to all of their private information on Facebook. So much for privacy. There is a tendency to assume that we’re being protected, that some geek somewhere has decided something that will guard our information. This is not a valid assumption. Read on! Continue reading The Illusion of Privacy

The Age of Consent

Post co-authored with Oded Cnaan, Director Innovation Business Development.

As I said in a previous post, the topic of social media is one I’ll be returning to often.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.”

George Orwell from “1984”

In the “old days”, before social media sites governed the earth, people were passive spectators in the great “WWW” show. Surfing the Web was about searching and consuming content with very little personal exposure. Back then, passionate discussions were held about the potential danger of cookies as they could reveal your IP address, and most people did not even consider disclosing their email address in public sites.

But this is all water under the bridge. Today, with more than 500 million Facebook registered users and 105 million Twitter users and 370,000 added daily, the rules of the game have definitely changed: most social network sites require users to provide personal profiles. Some sites, like Twitter, ask for only basic information while other, like LinkedIn and Facebook, offer a very detailed profile that includes personal details, employment and education history, likes and interests and more.

Continue reading The Age of Consent