In my previous post here, I talked about how data about people stored in form of user profiles can be used against them. Using data against somebody doesn’t necessarily mean using the data to prosecute them or blackmail, or at least not in the strictest sense. The phrase is used in this context to mean whatever way that data can be used that the owner doesn’t approve of.
In expounding how users’ data can and will be used against them, I will give a small anecdote of what happened a few days ago. I own a yahoo account which I created five years ago before I joined campus. Somewhere mid campus I discarded it for obvious reason that Gmail offered a more superior service. However I didn’t burn the bridge and usually I go back to clear spam or something like that. So last week after I logged, instead of being redirected either to my mailbox or the highlights page, I was presented with a page that said I needed to authorize yahoo to duplicate my data to a server in a different country. The prompt claimed that this move was to enable for more efficient services. Whether or not I allowed yahoo to duplicate the data they have about me is not relevant for now.
Yahoo, I would say were kind enough to state their intentions. There are a number of applications whose makers don’t care whether the users allow it or not. What they do is state somewhere in fine print that the provided data will be used in various ways. But we as users are very careless and the inclusion of Privacy policy to which one has to agree to is seen as a nuisance.
These applications mostly apply in Gmail and facebook. Consider an application that allows you to chat from anywhere. A user has to provide their username and password. Or probably when one is visiting a website and they need to comment on the page in Facebook, they have to provide their login details. In the real sense what happens is that the provision of those details is like telling the application to login on the user’s behalf.
What users miss out from such a feature is that somewhere in very small fonts, there is a variant of this statement, “we will use your data as we please”.
I have nothing against Skillpages, but while we are at it , I think that’s the lack of innovation. We have LinkedIn etc, why should anyone be registered to Skillpages? Anyway, late last year I got an email from somebody I didn’t expect to send me an email. It turned out they were inviting me to join skillpages. But we weren’t in good terms so I had to ask why they cared which sites I registered. I embarrassed myself because they said they had not done such a thing.
The blame goes entirely to skills pages. When a user registers from a link inside Gmail then all their contacts are imported and an email is sent to each one inviting them to skillPages. Not everyone in the contacts list fancies social sites.
As I pen off I just wanna remind everyone out there. Under any site where users have to create an account, there is always a section called privacy settings. From there, applications access to personal data can be controlled or even denied all together.
Let’s not enjoy the fruits of the information society while putting our reputation at risk. It is precarious that I haven’t talked about data being used to steal money from your bank account because that has been talked about before. I emphasize on handling ones data in a way that it keeps one reputation at check. This is because in the coming days reputation will be have more worth than money!!!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Couldn't have been said any better.
ReplyDelete