Surveillance: Someone's Watching You

The article mentions the invasion of privacy that comes with the internet. Through webcams, people are able to spy on you through this without you even knowing. Furthermore, the location access allows people and strangers to know where you are at all times. Companies buy and sell our information however we do not realise that we are also being spied on at all times and our privacy is completely invaded without us even knowing. Targeted adverts (date mining) is described as 'deep, intensive and persistent surveillance' (Naughton, 2014) which often lets, for example, to infer a Facebook user's IQ, sexuality, political views, personality ect. by what they must have liked on Facebook (Halliday, 2013) there has also been research showing that individual's attitudes can be subjective by what they see on Facebook feeds. 

I think there are definitely both positive and negative debates in relation to data mining. It could be considered a good thing as it helps to achieve a better online experience for the individual as everyone will have a different experience through the different advertising. The more the institutions know about you, for example Google, the more they are able to advertise appropriately and directly for the individual making it all the more suitable. However, this is of course breaching your privacy issues without the individual even knowing it as they are allowing institutions to share their date and sell it in order to make profits. It terms of allowing locations to be shown, this would mean strangers would be able to locate where you live and also the government are able to track you. The fact that you are able to be tracked and things like RFID are developing, the biggest ethical concern of privacy must be considered and the question really is, how much do you want a stranger to know? I think that with smart phone nowadays and the great factor of convergence, it enables a user to do everything on their phone efficiently, therefore makes it easier for hackers to understand everything about a person through accessing their device. Although convergence allows efficiency, it also means that your location would usually always be on, for example with the use of Google Maps for accuracy, however it enables people to easily track your every move, which is extremely unsafe. Not only do smart phones invade a person's privacy but also laptops. The webcam can be hacked into and used for other, complete strangers to see what you're doing and this is completely unethical. Although there are many issues with the internet and the privacy aspects, overall it depends completely on how much the individual is aware of situations going on and would therefore be more conscious of what they are doing online and whether or not they should be doing what they are doing; I think date mining is a great technique for institutions to make money and to create a better online experience for the individual, despite the annoying pop-up adverts that consume some web pages.