How Privacy Is Being Affected by The High Tech Companies

How Privacy Is Being Affected by The High Tech Companies

            Primarily, privacy is the state of being secluded from public intrusion and freedom against any outside disturbance. The concept is to enhance personal independence and alleviate infringement from non-authorized parties. With the advent of technological advancements, breach of privacy is highly recognized, mainly because of the element of digital discretion. Information on people is unethically accessed and sold to the highest bidders. Even so, governments across the globe have tried suppressing the matter; however, it is also a challenge to keep up with the ever-changing techno, logical trends. Be that as it may, this document elaborates on the symbiotic relationship between high tech companies and matters of privacy in light of assessing how it has been affected.

The essence of privacy is to induce an actual feeling of individuality and autonomy, but tech firms are using their resources rather than serve different ulterior motives. Information Technology (IT) experts aid and abed in this data breach through the various concepts of hacking. Hacking offers capabilities of accessing, distorting, collecting, sharing, and storing personal information, which many times are used against the victim (Martin, Borah & Palmatier, 2017). The information in question may be in the form of pictures, videos, call conversations, or text messages. All these may be used to implicate the person of interest with dire consequences intertwined.

The high tech firms come in through – consciously and unconsciously – providing a suitable platform to orchestrate these unethical practices. The logic is, a billion-dollar social media platform such as Facebook has billions of people accessing the application and link with people across the globe. However, it is not all identities on the authentic platform. Nearly half of the accounts established on the Facebook application are meant to satiate other purposes other than mere social interaction and a chance to connect globally. There being no viable ways to verify identities, it becomes to actuate malicious practices that threaten the lives of those with valid accounts. More often, the victim’s accounts end up being hacked and shared to create a derogative connotation to the sphere of influence (Martin, Borah & Palmatier, 2017). With that, it significantly destroys the victim’s image and reputation, along with personal embarrassments.

Other than that, tech firms have always been in the business of devising both technical challenges as well as viable solutions. A case in point is the relation between virus and antivirus. The business framework in itself is a shoddy operation. On one end, IT experts, coders, and programmers create malicious codes that affect the normalcy of computer devices, each with an intended target from the host. That adds up to the difference in characterization of virus attacks, with some affecting client’s files or stealing valuable information. These virus attacks may be in the form of Trojan, malware, adware, or even ransomware (Van den Hoven et al., 2014). On the other end, these computer geeks create counter codes to suppress the effect of the virus, and package them through branding and selling them universally. For them, the monopoly stays put as long as the codes are frequently upgraded to have more effect, and diversified to make them unfathomable intentionally.

In the aspect of future technology and privacy, there is seemingly more impact on the latter. For one, the considerations made on a personal level, such as actionable thoughts, may face a different perspective. High tech firms such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) invest heavily in emerging tech advancements. Their technology involves the betterment of military proponents, and all this, on some level, involves human input and considerations of actual instances (Martin, Borah & Palmatier, 2017). Therefore, highly classified special projects may be carried out to test the efficacy of their technology in different aspects. Better still, they entail some claws on information breach that may not be disclosed to the public eye but also have silent implications.

Aside from the matter of assessing data innovation vis a vis ethical standards, there is an additional need to rethink how conceivable it is that changes in mechanics impact the rules themselves. Technological innovation in this aspect does not solely impact security by adjusting the openness of data, besides, also through making changes in standards of protection themselves. For instance, person to person communication locales welcome clients to share more data than they, in any case, may (Gan, Chua & Wong, 2019). Eventually, the “oversharing” becomes acknowledged practice inside specific gatherings. With the factor of developing innovations, such implications can similarly be typical, and consequently, viable considerations should be made when attempting to suppress such effects.

Another fundamental matter in question is if, given the future (along with current) level of informational connection, it is worthy of protecting privacy by attempting to suppress intel from parties with the potential to use it undesirably. Arguably, there may be better viable chances to preserve privacy by virtue of transparency – by requiring people to justify their decisions made on an individual basis, thus contributing to the notion that resolutions are not lodged on merits of information illegitimacy. The approach is entwined with challenges, as it may be challenging to validate that the wrong information was used. Still, it may as well occur that citizens, in turn, collect data from those who do the same to them, e.g., governments. Such “counter-surveillance” may be applied to put together information, thereby enhancing the aspect of accountability (Horne et al., 2015). The open-source input may also offer actionable intelligence on data processing. In this context, transparency can be perceived as a pro-ethical entity contributing to privacy.

Even though innovation majorly affects the social occasion, stockpiling, recovery, and dispersal of data, its essence is in tow with resonating with availability/detachment and the subsequent control of data. It makes the chances more extensive just as equal access to data. My suggestion, it gets simpler to get to a person’s private data through more individuals. However, again, an individual can be rejected from fundamental data in an electronic arrangement by methods for an assortment of safety efforts, for example, passwords (Mbofung & Popoola, 2014). The innovative control of data suggests, among others, to combining data (converging of records), the repackaging that follows afterwards(interpretations and the incorporation of printed and graphical configurations), and the conceivable modifying of data (changing of photographic pictures) by electronic methods. The application of innovative materials in handling data/actionable intel can subsequently not be perceived as morally impartial.

In as much as there are negative connotations, there are compliance regimens that suppress those effects. The latest in the market is the inception of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force on 25^th May, two years ago (Voigt, Paul & Axel, 2017). The data regulation establishment hails from the EU in a bid to protect personal data based on more stringent considerations. Since its inception, it has recently gained popularity in The United States of America, with a significant inclination on the essence of  IT security personnel.

In conclusion, we ought to understand that digital data privacy ought to be of the utmost discretion. Personal information is inevitably essential and needs to be cushioned in the best ways possible. Also, it should be noted that despite high tech firms being at the forefront of a data breach, they are equally responsible for the safety measures taken in light of compliance and ethical inputs surrounding data protection.

References

Gan, M. F., Chua, H. N., & Wong, S. F. (2019). Privacy Enhancing Technologies implementation: An investigation of its impact on work processes and employee perception. Telematics and Informatics, 38, 13-29.

Horne, C., Darras, B., Bean, E., Srivastava, A., & Frickel, S. (2015). Privacy, technology, and norms: The case of smart meters. Social science research, 51, 64-76.

Martin, K. D., Borah, A., & Palmatier, R. W. (2017). Data privacy: Effects on customer and firm performance. Journal of Marketing, 81(1), 36-58.

Mbofung, U., & Popoola, S. O. (2014). Legal and ethical issues of information service delivery and library information science professionals in university libraries in Nigeria. Library Philosophy and Practice, 0_1.

Van den Hoven, J., Blaauw, M., Pieters, W., & Warnier, M. (2014). Privacy and information technology.

Voigt, P., & Von dem Bussche, A. (2017). The EU general data protection regulation (gdpr). A Practical Guide, 1st Ed., Cham: Springer International Publishing.