Privacy rights thrown to the wind via blogging and online socializing?
Millions of bloggers may be giving up greater privacy rights than they think per an article at Wharton School of Business’ Knowledge@Wharton.
The million-and-one ways in which the Internet can be useful, efficient and fun are well known. Its potential for abuse by pornographers, phishers, scammers and spammers has also been apparent since its early days. What has taken a bit more time to emerge, however, is awareness of the Internet’s increasing threat to privacy as people become more comfortable offering information about themselves online.
Faculty members at Wharton say people who access the Internet for what have become routine functions — sending email, writing blogs, and posting photos and information about themselves on social networking sites — do not realize how much of their personal privacy, their very identities, they put at risk. Nor do they fully comprehend the extent to which they are inviting mischief, embarrassment and harm, perhaps for decades to come, from others looking to dig up digital dirt. In addition, legal experts say that while laws already on the books provide criminal and civil remedies for some nefarious uses of personal information, the ways in which the Internet can be harnessed for questionable purposes that encroach on privacy have yet to be fully addressed by the courts.
Well reasoned article worth a read.