Ubiquitous Computing and Your Privacy

Ubiquitous Computing and Your Privacy

MySpace, Facebook, email, and collaborative sites for both work and leisure are a norm on the net these days. But did you know all of the content you post on many of these sites immediately become partially owned by the sites themselves? And, taking items away by deleting them never really gets rid of them. In fact, in Groundswell by Bernoff and Li, they state that trying to take something off the Internet that you have posted is like trying to remove pee from a pool. Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, perhaps sums it up best, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

Keep in mind that technology is everywhere all the time (ubiquitous) because of the onset of smartphones, and other mobile devices. You have a 21st century phenomenon. But, is what Scott McNealy said true? Cite and explain examples that support and argue against this statement.

Personally, I think that what Scott McNealy said was true about having "zero privacy anyway" but he was a little arrogant when he said "Get over it". In my opinion, it is true that you have zero privacy anyway, case in point; Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO) Facebook stated that the age of privacy is over. He said that when he started Facebook (FB) in his dorm room at Harvard, he was asked why he would want to put information on the Internet at all. But in the last five or six years, blogging has become very huge along with different services that has people sharing all types of information comfortably and openly with more people, which reflects that social norm is just something that has evolved over time. Facebook then view it as their role in the system to constantly be innovating and updating their system to match the current social norms. He went on to conclude "that a lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change -doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it." (Marshall Kirkpatrick, 2010).