Privacy and Advertisement

Yesterday’s morning radio show topic was “ worst industry secrets”. An IT guy called in anonymously, divulging that all his company’s emails pass through their department, and can be accessed by him and a bunch of other people. Put simply, they open their officemates’ emails and snoop around for information or interesting conversations at whim.

Sure, it isn’t all that inconceivable. But it got me thinking, how can we trust in sites like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Google to keep our information sufficiently private? If the local tech guy can read into his officemates’ emails, what guarantees that people from half-way around the world (presumably) won’t do the same with our online data? Then I remembered Facebook and privacy concerns about it and realized that there is no guarantee.

I never really got all the talk about Facebook’s privacy shenanigans until recently. That is to say, I never really knew that Facebook sells its users’ information to advertisers for them to exploit, among other privacy violations. Private profile or not, our information could be gathered for use on targeted advertising. Just an accidental click on an ad can forward your data to advertisers without you knowing it.

Our data is at the mercy of whoever runs these social networking sites. For now, like many others, I’m willing to brush it off as a minor overstepping of some sort. But this does make me think, what happens to our privacy if these websites keep pushing the envelope and what steps can we take once we are again abused?