Vanishing online privacy.
New York Times has an article published today, entitled How Privacy Vanishes Online, discussing how advanced computer systems can pretty much pinpoint to who and where a query came from. Computer scientists who have more advanced algorithms and tools at their disposal are now able to tell who a user is even if that user has used, in what the user thinks, complete anonymity.
“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.”
Now of course being the technology teacher that I am, I immediately thought about how to convey and teach this loss of anonymity to students. What immediately came to mind was that of Formspring. If you do not know the havoc that Formspring can cause, be warned. Doing some quick Google searches with the keywords “Formspring”, “school”, and “students” will lead to many interesting results.
Students need to be taught about the dangers that are hidden in a tool that can useful. Facebook can be a useful learning tool, but also a dangerous one as well. The same applies to other useful social media tools like Flickr, Twitter, and online chat clients. The current generation is very naive in seeing the potential dangers that hid in them, but we as educators are very ignorant in not educating this generation about the potential dangers. As educators we must teach and make students aware of the repercussions of what they send out when they hit “post” or “submit” or accepting a “friend” button. Making students conscious that the college and job application starts years before that application is even sent out is part of the battle.
“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”