Danny's reflection

This is an interesting article. It is about a movement called “Anti-facebook movement”, and analyzes it. A group of students at British universities known as “Facebook refusenicks”, they refuse to use facebook and boycott it. They mainly have three reasons to do that, first, what if the facebook use the user’s privacy information to make money? For example, selling the information to promotion companies which target specific age group for business purpose. Second, for event promoters, they believe traditional tools like posters and flyers are more useful that internet, and someone just rely on the social network for promotion will not become a successful promoters, word-of-mouth is the most powerful advertising tool. Third, they just don’t want to follow the trend.

But as they do so, they actually fall into the consequences of being “left out’. They don’t know what events are going on because all promotions are being held on social network. I think this is the cruel of reality, think about what will things be when a person don’t get a cell phone in 2000s? A family didn’t have a telephone in 1980s? This is what happening now. Of course, you can still live happily without access to the facebook, but the reality is, you will surely “miss something”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/student/student_life/article3152120.ece

Haze's reflection

It is all about a story of a man, Mustafa Fteja who own Facebook account has been banned without any warning and specific reason. Due to the cutoff of his Facebook account, he lost an important medium of keeping contact with his family and friends, part of his friends even misunderstood that Fteja was the one who made the option of “de-friend” them. He therefore started suing Facebook for $500,000 as compensation of his loss in the incident.

From the article we can see that Facebook – a kind of online community/platform that we usually use or rely on can be a tool to hold people’s relationship even we were in long distance. Yet, if we were being too relied on new technologies and suddenly they go error, we would have all contacts lost or nothing left. It could be a dilemma that not to be addressed easily.

Besides, the news shows that online communities could close the personal account of any one of us without any notice and reason. It’s seems that the web-masters could close down or block our account and information that offense the site’s own “interest” but they were not responsible to reply anything as they has already assume all of us have agree the terms of Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Therefore, carefully handle the usage of these tools and publication of information is our own responsibility and is a must.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/staten_island/antisocial_network_WIiiaZ4tHPBHHlXx4GuG5I

Kitty's Reflection

In nowadays, social network is important for people to contact others or search information, but it also brings some problem when we use internet. In my opinion, people can contact and communicate with their friends, and build up the community group in Facebook but it also reduces privacy while users use it. It is because the security system of Facebook is not high, other people can through Facebook to know the users’ private information and get their photos. Therefore, we cannot write down all private information into Facebook and confirm strangers to be friend carefully.
Although we cannot prevent other people show our photos to others, we can show less information to public and set up high security system to protect our privacy. In fact, the relationship between our daily life and social network become more and more close, so we must protect our private information carefully, and cannot indulge in social network excessively and ignore the relationship between parents and us.

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/2011/04/04/the-anti-social-network/

Valerie's Reflection

The news I am looking at is a person, Sidney Hill, who has tried his best to protect his personal information from the internet. He is very aware to the internet. As he mentioned, he only shop at well-known or well established site, he never sign up for email list. He also said that he protect his privacy by “assortment of spammers, identity thieves and other disreputable character lurking in cyberspace.” However, now he has abandoned these efforts he put on protecting his privacy for these years. He is now choosing to consider the benefit and think in the good way that passing personal information online could bring. The reason behind is that, he thinks that no matter how much effort he puts, he still cannot prevent his personal information being disclosed or anonymity in this digital age. The government is also not protecting citizen’s information. The online privacy law has not play any role on the issues. The US government is encourage the clinic doctor to adopt the electronic health record system, which he see it as away to make it easier to reveal personal information online. Selling and collecting data of personal information as a business for many online company and the say “information being stolen online” have emerge in an endlessly, it makes Sidney distrusts the claim of any online privacy.
Sidney’s point of view to the online privacy has also spoke out lot of people’s views to the issues of online privacy. The information flow in cyberspace is too fast and I may argue that even is uncontrollable. And in fact many sites have asked people to provide their personal information. These sites always claim that they will not disclose the information and they will just use the information in an appropriate way or in order to provide the users a better service. Imagine the e-banking systems which ask you to provide real detail information, once the information have been stolen from this system, the consequent is big enough to threat all people and must create a huge social issues. Or the Facebook, always being discussed when talking online privacy issues, the Facebook always have no clear guideline on how your information would be used and how it protects you information. After reading the news and thinking about the term “online privacy” it makes me wonder, in nowadays digital age, do we having any way to protect our personal information? If I am an American, is it possible not to go to hospital or go to see doctor seem my health record may put online? It seems to me that “online” and “privacy” cannot coexist.



Sidney, Hill. “There's No Sense Stressing About the End of Privacy.” ECT News Network, Inc. 15Apr, 2011. 16Apr, 2011.

Vinice's Reflection

It was a news released in July 2010, reporting that the privacy setting of Facebook was unreliable. It was pointed out because an employee of a firm Skull Security had complied and released the personal data on more than a hundred users. The Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that the information which were available to access were those enable people to find each friend, which was the reason people joininng Facebook. Although the CEO had made this statement, those companiees and organizations that co-operated with Facebook, had also downloaded the file. On one hand, they were curious to see if their names were on the list, on the other hand they were interested to see whether the information would help them target advertising and outreach efforts, say privacy advocates. it means, after this incident happened, users' Facebook might be more public and they would then receive more advertisments.

Mark Zuckerberg said the reson people joining Facebook was because they could look for others, including the old or ‘missing’ friends. However, I believed that there is a number of Facebook users’ do not realized how widely their data were being shared. In addition, most people were under the impression that when set the ‘privacy setting’, they would not change. Nevertheless, Facebook itself would change the privacy setting automatically. In the summer of 2009, the setting changed twice in this period. Both times, some of users’ privacy settings had defaulted back to the public options. In this case, do the Facebook users have to check the private setting frequently, for example, half a year? Would all people immediately know the setting being rectified?

Fortunately, it is pleased that there are security firms or privacy advocates concern the issue in order to protect the public. Once they have discovered something wrong, they would sooner or later report to the journalists. The Facebook claimed that it would not disclose personal data to others unless the companies were registered and being permitted by Facebook. So, it means that the users’ data would not be widely shared but it would be a part of computational advertising. Hence, the regulations of this online community was really blur and vulnerable. This news may be just an iceberg. Therefore, it would be better to set up an authority or designate a Bureau to monitor all online communities as they utilize the client’s data, and to request them to tighten up their regulations. People once access online would be shared their data indeed. Thus, it is a part of user’s responsibility to protect their personal information, too. There are much more fibbers on the net. Actually, netizens have to take necessary precautions by themselves.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/new-economy/2010/0730/Privacy-issues-hit-Facebook-again

Ella's reflection

This news has recalled many people’s minds. They do not have any privacy in the Internet; people cannot control their privacy even they wanted to. Internet has broken the public and private sphere, its blur in the society. In this case, there are a big connection between facebook and Google. Both of them said that, they have tried hard to protect people’s privacy. In fact, what they can protect people is not that much. As the news has told us, it is a platform we sharing, we can only put one word and search much more that we want. Thus, is that the information linked to any privacy, maybe yes, but is that call private or public. We cannot control who are the audience, everyone can be the one.

Besides, Facebook is increasingly complex privacy settings for their customer, it sounds they can control their privacy, to have the impression management and identity issues. Such as, I can show this picture for merely one or two friends. Yet, Facebook maker is the one who control, not customer. The merely one things that people can control their privacy is that they can choose what to upload or download. People are a subject that can have a part of control of their privacy in the Internet.

The Internet is no privacy, the entire private will become public when you upload something or do something in the web. There are many invisible audiences and it is hard to manage. Thus people are not the merely object in the society, because we can choose how to protect ourselves, so that we are also the subject, we need to know that we are going to protect by ourselves instead of any system of privacy which is provide by the web company.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12049153

Zack's reflection

This is an article about using human blood for making electronic circuits. After reading this article, i'm quite interesting in it. If the human blood could carry memories and it could be demonstrate by certain chips, then would it mean that the robots that were made by these chips could be act more like a human? In a certain extent, the behavior of a person was influenced by his or her past memories. Even with the same subject, different past memories should have different action towards the subject. So, when the chips carry a person blood and which the chips could store varying amounts of "memories", it could have more fuctions on the robots or we could not say it is a fuction any more. They could learn, rewrite the momries, and do whatever they wants.

Here's the link of the article.
http://www.allvoices.com/s/event-8641504/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5mb3huZXdzLmNvbS9zY2l0ZWNoLzIwMTEvMDMvMzEvY3lib3JnLWVsZWN0cm9uaWMtY2lyY3VpdHMtaHVtYW4tYmxvb2Qv