Is Technology a Serious Threat to Our Privacy?

It is increasingly common to share personal details on social media and online dating sites. The number of people who have profiles on online sites is staggering: Facebook currently has over 1.44 billion users worldwide, Twitter has over 236 million users, and Instagram has 300 million. Even newer apps like Yik Yak have millions of users, and one in five adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have used an online dating site. Studies have shown that the longer people use these sites, the more information they reveal without thinking about the possible consequences.

According to a 2015 Huffington Post report, 25 percent of Facebook users don’t bother using their privacy settings. In addition, 63 percent of Facebook profiles are set on “visible to the public,” meaning that anyone can access information. Even more disturbing is that every time a user visits a site with a “like” button, Facebook gets a notice, even if the user doesn’t push the button. Not surprisingly, the Internet has become the primary tool for those who want to access personal information: employers routinely use social-networking sites to find out about job candidates, advertisers buy their data to target consumers, and cybercriminals use information from these sites to steal users’ identities.

In response to complaints, the federal government has begun to focus on the issue of cyberprivacy. As a result of pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook, Twitter, and Google have agreed to submit to privacy audits, and in response to complaints by users, Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, has repeatedly revised the site’s privacy policies. Although privacy audits expose important weaknesses, critics claim that the only way to absolutely ensure privacy is for people to disengage from social media entirely and to avoid sharing personal information online. Others disagree, saying that social networks are a fact of life and that people have to learn to use them responsibly. In other words, people should have no expectation of privacy when they post information about themselves online.

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Later in this chapter, you will be asked to evaluate a number of research sources to determine if they are acceptable for an argumentative essay on the topic of technology and privacy. In Chapter 9, you will learn how to integrate sources into an essay on this general topic. In Chapter 10, you will see an MLA paper on one aspect of the topic: whether it is ethical for employers to access information posted on job applicants’ social-networking sites. Finally, in Chapter 11, you will learn how to use sources responsibly while considering the question “Where should we draw the line with plagiarism?”