The Illusion of Privacy

     One of our assignments this week is to create an account with Linkedin and StumbleUpon.  Both sites seem to be fairly clean without a lot of advertisement.

     When I reviewed these sites I tried to see them through the eyes of a potential employee, career networker and potential employer.

     They aren’t bad sites, but after reviewing them, nothing jumps out at me to convince me that these sites are super advantageous.  I don’t know.  Once I am an established business person, I may change my mind and revisit these sites.

     I do know that regardless of whether or not you actively use a site you join, you are permanently linked to that site by email, name, etc.  The actual site title that you signed up for may not send spam or the like, but here is an example of part of Linkedin’s privacy policy.  I highlighted some important parts of the partial citation.  To read the entire policy, go to Linkedin and double click on their “privacy policy” at the bottom of their page:

      "1.       Number one out of seven (please check this out for yourself)  “Personal information collected,”  We collect information: 

1.     We use cookies and other technologies to recognize you, customize your experience, and serve

2.      Like all websites, we automatically receive from your internet use information like your IP address, the URLs of sites from which you arrive or leave the LinkedIn website, your type of browser, your operating system, your mobile provider, your mobile device, and your ISP.

3.     We retain information you provide in connection with third party services available through LinkedIn like surveys and polls or other third party research undertaken with your consent,” (linkedin, 2010).

     StumbleUpon is a pretty nifty site.  It reminds me of a refined FaceBook.  It has all the features of FaceBook and tracks your interests and tailors search results to your personal interests and hobbies.

     StumbleUpon’s privacy statement is pretty tight.  If you do want to join a site like FaceBook but geared more toward your personal interest StumbleUpon may be a fun site to try.

     I could only find one policy statement I did not like in StumbleUpon’s privacy statement:

“Any information contained on publicly available portions of the StumbleUpon website (e.g. member profiles or other areas that are not password protected) may be “crawled” by third party search engines.  As a result, any Personal Information you include on such publicly available portions of the StumbleUpon website may be accessible through search engines in search results.  Moreover information on publicly any information you place on publicly available portions of the website, including Personal Information, is accessible by any third party and is not subject to this Privacy Policy,” (StumbleUpon, 2010).

      In conclusion, different Web sites can be a lot of fun and/or advantageous to join for networking and receiving information tailored to your interest.  Just be a aware that once you sign up for them you are pretty much linked to them forever.

References:

Linkedin (2010).  Retrieved from:  http://www.linkedin.com/  , November 28, 2010.

StumbleUpon (2010).  Retrieved from:   http://www.stumbleupon.com/.   November 28, 2010.

Social Networking – We have to try it, naturally.

First there was email, then personal Web pages, then My Space, then Face Book, then Twitter. 

Email is convenient, simple, fairly safe and easily controlled by the sender and receiver.  Web pages are flashier than email and provide more of a thrill for the creator of the page than email.  How cool, the Internet and World Wide Web provide an instant audience for anyone who wants one.

My Space was pretty cool too.  A personal web page, so to speak, could be easily built by the poster within the My Space site and the poster could send and receive messages on their page.  It also enabled the poster to accept or decline posters to their page or make their page, mostly, private if they wanted to.

My Space took off so well it soon became bogged down with too many applications and advertisements which overloaded the page and made it download really slowly.  This made the page less easily accessible and/or enjoyable to use. 

Face Book streamlined My Space, cut out some of the bells and whistles, offered more privacy options and became the new favorite social networking site.  Then came Twitter; Twitter streamlined social networking even further and enabled the user to spew one-liners without revealing any information about themselves other than their name and post.  Perfect!

New and some exciting social networking tools were introduced to consumers through the Internet and World Wide Web.  Consumers, in the midst of pushing the applications of these tools to their limit, are figuring out the pros and cons to these tools and are fine tuning them accordingly. 

The Internet and World Wide Web applications seem to be among some of the only products of the sciences that their results cannot be tested and quantitatively proven before release to the general public.  Good or bad, where and how these tools fit well into our society is unfolding naturally.   

What I Want from Online Education

An online class provides me more freedom of setting my own schedule and saves me travel time.  By taking an online class a person does give up some of the social and informational immediacy benefits of a face-to-face class but trades them for the benefits described in the previous sentence.

Online classes and face-to-face classes are two different products that strive to achieve the same goal.  The goal is to deliver information to a student about a certain subject and have the student digest, retain and process this information.  In return, the student must be able to regurgitate the information in some type of way at a level acceptable by an educational institution, usually determined by way of testing or writing an essay, in order to receive credit for completion of a course of study.

Whether or not a student chooses an online class or a face-to-face class is according to their needs and at their discretion.  For the sake of argument however, I realize that not all subjects of study are chosen this easily, i.e. your school may not offer a class you want to take by way of a certain method you desire and/or certain areas of study are not deemed conducive to one method or the other; but in reality, most any scenario is doable if you can afford to pay for it!   

What I want from online classes encompasses most of the same things I want from face-to-face classes.  I want quality, integrity, commitment, reliability and good customer service.

School is a business.  It involves a buyer, a seller and a product.  I don’t see any reason why post-secondary schools should receive any more media hype about being involved in e-commerce than any other retailer selling their product online.

I do not believe post-secondary brick and mortar schools will ever become extinct.  I hope a nice balance of face-to-face classes as well as online classes will be the norm for years to come.

In conclusion, John Palfrey said it best in the video lecture we watched this week when the computer science teacher asked him a question about how the use of online information is best used in the classroom.  Palfrey answered as follows, “I think it’s amazing of what you can do if you know how to use it and when to use it.  And I think that is the thing, I think, that we are not yet doing in classrooms,” (Palfrey, 2008)

Reference:

Palfrey, J. (2008).  John Palfrey lecture.  YouTube.  Retrieved from https://cotc.angellearning.com/section/content/default.asp?WCI=pgDisplay&WCU=CRSCNT&ENTRY_ID=15DE3E30E4EB4323BEC6DA106F1A2836.  November 14, 2010.

Net Neutrality (blog #2)

OK.   Here we go.  Talk about stressed out in 2010.  It’s all about technology growing too large too fast and nobody knows what to do with(about) it. 

Regulating broadband (against Net Neutrality) is absurd.  How much of the ice berg we call freedom are we going to let the government chip away at before we realize it’s too late to turn back?  The lending crisis and the recent exposure of government greed proven by the ever widening gap between the upper and lower classes of the United States should be enough for the majority of U.S. citizens to take their rights seriously and quit being made fools of. 

The government and some of the big corporations such as Comcast are panicking.  Internet technology has grown so fast and so large no one knows how to handle it.  Comcast is afraid of losing its rank among the large broadband corporations so they are trying to get the government to make laws that will give them the power to have control over the Internet freedom we have now so that they can keep their rank by force rather than performance.  If Comcast would spend half as much energy producing a great product at prices consumers couldn’t turn down they wouldn’t have to worry about it.  Instead, they are approaching their fears the wrong way.  If net neutrality is shot down and Comcast sets precedence for this type of regulation more regulation of its type will follow and this is scary.

In an episode of “Q&A” on C-SPAN, Brian Lamb was interviewing Meredith Whitney, Financial Analyst and CEO of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group LLC.  One of the questions asked Whitney’s opinion about Financial Regulation.  I felt her answer was a good answer regarding any kind of consumer regulation imposed by the Federal Government.  Whitney answered, “If you underestimate your audience, your audience will turn on you and I think politicians have grossly underestimated the American people and that’s dangerous,” (Whitney, 2010).

Like Bob Pepper said in the video we watched in week 2 Bob Pepper on Net Neutrality, “does it mean do you want new regulation; no, you don’t need it,” (Pepper, 2010).   “Farber, one of the creators of the Internet, said that, if issues feared by net neutrality advocates do arise, there are already laws to deal with them.  “Antitrust law works fairly well and can be used effectively if someone gets out of line, and the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] has the ability to act if something egregious happens,” he said.  (Rash, 2010).

References:

Pepper, B. (no date given).  Bob Pepper on Net Neutrality.  HowStuffWorks.  Retrieved from https://cotc.angellearning.com/section/content/default.asp?WCI=pgDisplay&WCU=CRSCNT&ENTRY_ID=51514380B47F4AD9BEFC97824E606A20.  November 1, 2010.

Rash, W. (2006). Net neutrality debate lingers. eWeek, 23(27), 17. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.  November 1, 2010.

Whitney, M. (2010).  Q&A.  C-SPAN.  Retrieved from http://www.q-and-a.org/search.aspx?For=Meredith+Whitney.  November 1, 2010.