Big Brother is watching us…

As long as trade exists, the desire for running further research on consumers’ preferences won’t stop. That’s exactly how social networks make profit; by taking advantage of that desire. Social networking sites offer their services and at the same time ‘build’ consumers’ profiles, violating their private life and most of the time without their knowledge.

For instance, Facebook’s users reacted against Beacon application when they realized that everyone could watch their online activities as they were all available in their profile - e.g what they bought for whom, how much it cost them, buying a ticket, booking flights, events attended, and so on. Some of them were really upset, even deleted their facebook accounts in order to get their privacy back.

One of the creators of Facebook, Mark Zuckenberg, apologized and supported that their initiative goal was to share selective activities of the users’ choice, not all of them. Unfortunately, they didn’t manage to do it straight away, they needed more time to achieve this.

Lets be honest…facebook is fun and it’s a very interesting way of communication between friends and family. Somehow we are partly responsible for that violation of privacy as we never get to read the ‘fine print’ on anything, therefore how can we be sure we enhance security of our data at all times?