...Google and Privacy Google, the popular search engine, has become an invaluable resource in the lives of many. The search engine’s ability to turn the chaotic warehouse of information that is the Web into a categorized and navigable tool has propelled Google to its current position at the heart of modern technological culture. Yet, Google has not been able to fly under the radar in terms of privacy. While its services are greatly valued, they are also the target of a significant amount of criticism. The right to privacy is a great individual concern and considering that there are over a billion unique Google users, the issue of possible privacy invasion is both an important and immediate one (citation). The privacy debate is complicated, however, by the fact that Google has deemed the traditional understanding of privacy invasion as outdated. By providing a valuable service that users trust at the risk of possible privacy invasion, Google has changed the way in which one thinks about privacy invasion. Experts agree that Google has an ability to attract users’ trust and information based on the benefits of the service it provides. According to Kevin Bankston, Google is expecting us to trust it (Mitchell 1). This complicates the privacy debate in that formerly potential privacy invasion was neither willingly entered into nor beneficial in any way. Michael Zimmer credits the convenience of Google as the reasoning for users’ unwavering trust and disclosure (citation). Meanwhile...
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...the company name] | Google and Privacy Issues | | | Google is the highest used internet search engine and is free for international use. Good and bad exists with everything and although Google provides people all over the world with tons of information, it is constantly being overlooked and controlled by the people who created it and who control it which can be seen as a huge downside for many individuals. There are many critisms of Google such as manipulation of search results, violating people’s privacy and censorship of search results such as page ranking. Although Google provides services that play a large part in many people’s lives for free, it does come at the price of an individual’s personal information and privacy. Google, Facebook and every browser ever created have always gathered data and used that data, but never have these companies created a compilation of personal information based on years of our trusting them. Google has been attempting and has begun to succeed in taking over all of our digital media, from the top used search engine as well as Gmail and Google news which have become the number one news source for many people. People are taking information that they want to hear and Google has been trapping society in a box by finding out our major interests and purely basing everything else off of that rather than incorporating new ideas. Google has the power to control us without us even realizing it and “because Google is so readily available...
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...Google and Internet Privacy In this exercise on ethics and privacy policy we focus our studies on an oft occurring situation in offices that have multiple employees sharing office resources that may lead to intrusive instances. The case refers to a couple of employee’s complaints of unwarranted pop-ups on their computers from unsolicited advertisers. In particular, the ads pertain to some sorts of HIV/AIDS medications that stimulate recovery from this fatal disease or at least help cope with it. The immediate suspicion goes toward targeted marketing carried out by many online advertisers today using pervious browsing history and other such tools available to them. The employees delve about the possibility of who these ads were targeted to without questioning their basic premise of whether these were targeted ads at all. They go on to narrow down the list of suspects to two individuals who also use the computer in question. In the discussion, they list out the personality traits of these individuals that they have been able to perceive based on their short interactions with them. (Since they work in different shifts the interactions would not have been detailed). These cursory definitions lead to them zeroing in on Charlie Patton as the culprit behind the pop-up ads. They suspect him of having AIDS and are now pondering on how to tackle the situation. However, the basic questions here aren’t being asked. They are, if it was indeed a problem, or just a marketing blitz with...
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...systematically-gathered, street-level image collections, such as Google Street View, EveryScape, and Mapjack. In the process of gathering images of public spaces, these projects also capture license plates, faces, and other information considered sensitive from a privacy standpoint. In this work, we present a system that addresses the challenge of automatically detecting and blurring faces and license plates for the purpose of privacy protection in Google Street View. Though some in the field would claim face detection is “solved”, we show that state-of-the-art face detectors alone are not sufficient to achieve the recall desired for large-scale privacy protection. In this paper we present a system that combines a standard sliding-window detector tuned for a high recall, low-precision operating point with a fast post-processing stage that is able to remove additional false positives by incorporating domain-specific information not available to the sliding-window detector. Using a completely automatic system, we are able to sufficiently blur more than 89% of faces and 94 96% of license plates in evaluation sets sampled from Google Street View imagery. 1. Introduction In the last two years, there has been a rapid expansion of systematically-gathered street-level imagery available on the web. The largest and probably most well-known collection to date is Google Street View1 [13]. Street View launched as part of Google Maps in May 2007 and has expanded rapidly since, at...
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...Google Street View Invasion of Privacy The enthusiasm was evident in social networks by the entry of Google Street View. For many of us was practical for others this development can mean a violation of privacy. The pictures of house numbers, which are taken from doors and fences on its Street View mapping service, appear on Google’s websites. According to the article of Consumer Affairs Editor (Hall, 2012), campaign groups said that the use of pictures of real house numbers presents “serious” security issues, and accused the internet company of being “underhand and crude”. Earlier this year, a Frenchman shown urinating in his front yard on Google Street View sued the company already facing criticism over privacy policy changes, PC World reported. Other embarrassing moments captured by the cars' cameras include men entering adult-entertainment stores and a naked man emerging from the trunk of a car. In 2010, Google's cars also collected Wi-Fi data in several countries, prompting independent investigations, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Information gathered included email passwords and content and device and network IDs related to private wireless networks (Poulnot, 2012). Not formal legal action against Google's street imagery has been filed yet. Hence, privacy law attorneys say taking pictures of public places is legal. "The law allows you to take a picture of anything you can see as long as you're in a public place," said Kelli Sager, a 1st Amendment...
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...Big Brother is Real and Active in Our Lives George Orwell’s novel, 1984, speaks of a world where an all-powerful dictator named Big Brother eliminates personal freedom and thought. There is much argument about whether or not the world in his novel ties in with our own world. Do we have enough privacy or are we constantly under surveillance? The argument on personal privacy is far from a new debate. Some people argue that the government has too much access to what we do, while others say that the government’s intrusion is fine. In our age, the digital age, everything is online and private information is available to the government. The so called “Big Brother”, or, our government and algorithms, is watching over US citizens in illegal and inappropriate ways. Private companies like Facebook or Google have access to what one searches on those sites, but the video “What Google and Facebook Are Hiding” demonstrates how those sites save and...
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...Privacy in the 21st Century Eng 122 Mrs. Samaniego 10 June, 2013 In today’s society cameras are watching every step you take and every move you make. How do you feel about that? Someone is watching you, whether it is the surveillance cameras at a gas station or it’s the security guard in a shopping mall. Does this make you feel uncomfortable? You post something on Facebook and decide to delete it 5 minutes later, but did you know that it will always be on the internet although you deleted it? You may not see it but others will. In today’s society, personal privacy rarely exists. There are certain devices and tools that people use when trying to invade someone’s privacy including hidden cameras and satellites. Privacy no longer exists due to all of the new technologies and programs enabling the invasion of someone’s privacy. What is privacy? Do people today really understand what privacy is? Have they had the opportunity to experience privacy? The definition of privacy is “allowing an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal them selectively.” When something is private it is usually something personal or valuable to someone. Everyone likes privacy but...
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...Employee Privacy Rights in the Workplace Vicki Puckett COM 120 Allyson Wells October 8, 2006 Do you think that your employee rights entitle you to workplace privacy? Well, think again. The fact is that most employers monitor their employee in one way or another. In the workplace, many employers are violating the privacy rights of their employees by surveillance, genetic testing, and sexual orientation. According to some workplace privacy studies, there is a good chance that your employer is monitoring your internet activities, including the Web pages you read, and messages you read and post in forums, blogs, and chat rooms. Your employer could also be spying on you in several other ways as well. Some may include recording your phone conversations, videotaping your every move within the company, and tracking your location with the company cell phone. Such monitoring is almost entirely unregulated. Therefore, unless company policy specifically states otherwise, your employer may listen, watch and record most of your workplace communications. The rapid growth of workplace monitoring and surveillance technology has far out paced the development of laws that protect worker privacy interests. Modern technology has provided employers with more advanced and effective means of monitoring their employees. As a result, electronic monitoring of employees in the workplace has become far more prevalent in recent years...
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...security and privacy risks and their possible consequences. As we have covered in our group tasks, literary it is not possible to avoid digital footprints. It is possible to minimizing footprints, but if we consider how present day life routine goes everything is electronic. Even if we are aware of our active digital footprints, it is easy to find passive digital footprints for somewhere on the internet. I do not take myself as an active online user. For this task, I have try to check my footprints from Google download my data and Facebook personal data request. I consider myself to be not too active online at least in recent years, even though I have able to find a lot of digital footprints and some of the digital footprint are surprising....
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...205 How would you feel if someone that had never met you and had never seen your face was able to tell you that your favorite movies were “50 First Dates, 10 Things I Hate About You, and The Princess Bride,” and that you “browse entertainment news and like to take quizzes” (Angwin, 2010). Would you feel your privacy had been sbreached because someone must have spied on you without your knowledge? That is what happened to Ashley Hayes-Beaty. “Miss Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called ‘beacon’ to capture what people are typing on a website” (Angwin, 2010). According to PCWorld Magazine (Sullivan, 2012), personal web habits are being tracked by companies such as Lotame Inc. and Facebook, advertisers, and corporations that “stalk” consumers on the web, and then sold to marketers and the government without web users being informed or aware of it. People like Ashley are suing data brokers that “sold consumer profiles to other companies without taking steps required under the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act to protect consumers” (Gross, 2012). Digital consumer monitoring is a breach of privacy that needs to be addressed. Personal data is being collected and sold without consumer consent, and the current regulatory environment is weak. As this issue becomes more prominent, a variety of solutions have been proposed, such as personal data “lockers,” Shine the Light Law, and transparency within companies....
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...Everyone can surely come to agreement that they should not track every U.S. citizen because it is an extreme waste of resources and tax dollars and a violation of due process. However, there's another, less obvious, face to the problems that result from a lack of the expectation of privacy over the Internet. The White House proposed the consumer privacy “bill of rights”. This bill was intended to prevent web services such as Google from collecting your information and selling it to a third party without giving you the ability to opt-out and without giving you the ability to review what kind of information they're giving to these third parties. This was a really important proposal as it was one of the few that, had it succeeded, would have been a huge success for consumer rights. If this...
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...The Value of Digital Privacy in the IT Age The Value of Digital Privacy in the IT Age Digital Privacy in the IT age is almost extinct. The World Wide Web houses information about anything and everyone. People use the digital technology everyday with the impression that what they are doing is protected from others, unless they chose. While few consumers are fully aware of how their data is being used and even fewer are capable of actively managing it, most individuals expect their digital identity to be treated responsibly and openly: 79%, for example, said companies should be more transparent about use of personal data. There are systems and technologies that people use to gain access to a person’s information. The information obtained can be an advantage or disadvantage. The government has implemented laws for years to try to establish some controls There are many technologies that will allow an individual to research citizens, but the three that will be discussed are Facebook, Intellus, and Google. Facebook is a web based social app use to contact friends. A person can either download for free or buy “apps” for a small amount of money. Apps are games, quizzes and sharing services. These “apps” are consists a host of personal information which includes emails, current locations, sexual preferences of “app” users and their friends. Intelius allows people to access personal records by name, social security number or phone number. People use this system to find family or do...
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...The latest technology is causing controversy all over the world, the newest being the Google Glasses. The purpose of this is to show what the glasses are. There are parts of the world that are against the glasses, either by Google itself or the glasses. Then how Google has been at at the front of new technology. Even though people are just seeing the problems with privacy, it was there way before the glasses were even made. First the reader should know what the Glass looks like. According to Google, they have “adjustable nose pads and a frame that allows a one-size-fits-all offering and two extra nose pads are included. The display is said to have the appearance of a 25-inch HD screen viewed from eight feet away. As expected, image capture is a key feature, with 5MP stills and 720p video supported. Also integrated is 16GB of total flash memory, of which 12 GB is usable and synchronised with Google-supplied cloud storage.... The battery allows one day of typical use, but is reduced by power-hungry operations such as video capture.(Google)” If you wear regular prescription glasses, "‘The Glass design is modular, so you will be able to add frames and lenses that match your prescription,’ the Glass team said in a Google+ post. ‘We understand how important this is and we've been working hard on it.’(Albanesius)” Google+ is the social network work site within Google. “Google glasses that overlay the Internet on daily lives should hit the market in a little more than a year -- technology...
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...How Data Mining can help a business Data mining can help business strike gold when preparing products for a consumer. However, what is data mining? The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) defines data mining as “the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases” (N.D.). Oracle helps refine this definition, as this method “provides a way to get at the information buried in the data” (Oracle, N.D.). Oracle goes on to state how data mining helps find “patterns that sometimes elude traditional statistical approaches to analysis because of the large number of attributes, the complexity of patterns, or the difficulty in performing the analysis” (N.D.). There is petabytes of data for many companies and agencies to sort though. Many turn to cloud systems, or run programs that extract the data for them from their sources. UCLA goes on to define data as including operational data, nonoperational data, and Meta data. They use this information to help find associations, relationships, and/or patterns with in the data. They use this to develop knowledge about historical data. Companies like Volvo started to leverage cloud computing. They felt that each car could provide information that improved each car as it was built and driven. They also felt that the information provided by each car could improve the consumer experience while driving one of their cars. To support this, Volvo developed a sensor suite that contained...
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...human population. Current statistics are citing gigantic numbers of the quantity of data that users generate - 2 000 queries on Google and 48 hours of video uploaded every minute are just some of the examples of the humongous size of information created online. This data is valuable due to the increasing number of e-commerce businesses employing the Web as their main platform for exchanging goods for value. Moreover, online data has become a topic of interest for marketers, researches, advertisers and publishers trying to gather as much information as possible in order to improve target advertising and deliver tailored content to their clients. Hence the information of a single browsing user is highly demanded due to the fact that it can provide insights into different online behaviors and optimize online campaigns. In 2006, the EU calculated that the value of open data in Europe (i.e. releasing all government information for free) would be € 27 billion (Dekkers) that is € 55 per European citizen. With a valuation of around $ 100 billion, the value that Facebook holds in 2012 is roughly $ 120 (€ 90) per active member. (NY Times) Personal data online is tracked by cookies, which are small pieces of code placed on the browser that remember the user and its information with a unique identification. Legislation in a lot of countries is unclear on their privacy and cookie laws, leaving the user unaware of the ways their information is stored and also the value of their browsing data....
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