Privacy is getting compromised in the modern digital age come social networking – Part 1

There was a time when just drawing the window shades ensured a private sanctuary. But the digital age is less shade and more glaring light, and it is shining brightly on personal data.

“There has never been another time in history where privacy was under the kind of assault it is today,” said Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Consumers have increasingly digital lives and they are developing an unfathomably large data trail every day.”

There is a perfect storm, Reitman says, involving digital lives, low-cost storage that allows companies to save everything, and the revenues that incent those companies to collect as much data as possible.

The long-term consequences on privacy are an unknown, but Internet users are feeling some fatigue and questions are flying as the law chases data sharing technologies operated by some of the richest juggernauts ever.

In addition, technologists are busy designing tools intended to give end-users control over their lives online.

How deep is the glut of personal and “private” information online?

Each week users post 3.5 billion pieces of content on Facebook, according to social media firm HubSpot. Google runs about 900,000 servers to handle the load of its services, according to independent estimates. Twitter claims 100 million active users. And Nielsen estimates that social media sites and blogs reach 80% of all active U.S. Internet users.

It’s not just the volume of individual pieces of data, but the aggregation of that data that starts to really raise the hackles of privacy advocates.

That point was reinforced over the past week with news of Google’s new privacy policy, which allows the company to aggregate user information across services, and Facebook’s no-opt out deployment of its Timeline, which mixes a users past with the present.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Jan 31 2012. Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.