Social Media and Surveillance

MM52 Archive

Article Summary:

The article is about the government trying to track people's online activity to prevent violent crimes from taking place. Students that were given laptops by the school, were having there camera's being used by teachers to view what pupils were doing at home.

Privacy- people, especially young people want to have private space. They want a place where they can do whatever they like to in the place they like to, without anyone snooping around spying on them. Generally, such place would be their bedroom, where they will disclose any private things with someone close to them (generally the same age as them). A psychologist stated that individuals change their personality and behaviour depending on the type of people they are around For example, if at work the behaviours would be professional and smart whereas with friends, it may be inappropriate/humorous. By having a Facebook account and a nearby family member adds you as a friend, the life sphere will be gone. This is because on one hand a youngster may use false language with friends, but very mature with parents. By such an event occurring shatters ones privacy, as that member can see their posts.

Data mining- Facebook users are worth about £1.73. These sites use a lot of advertising revenue in order to gain more revenue. They use a method known as data mining where they track most of your online movements and link up the potential interests that you (the user) hold.

The government, both the UK and USA use a surveillance method where they track data of millions of users who interact with the internet.

Critical autonomy:

In general, as a user I do care about my own privacy. I understand that such precautions need to be taken place in order to secure the general public, but it also challenges audiences ideologies of the government. They may think that the government is making a scheme of collecting data on certain individuals and can break trusts between society and the government. The idea of breaking into people's webcams is breaking the boundaries. If it were online tracking and nothing else, I would have little objection to it, but by breaking into webcams to see what people are up to is completely against the nations interest. It strips people off of their privacy and can break trust. People may not ever want to touch a computer again due to knowing this as its harms are far more significant and such harms can be privacy breaking.