Privacy Policies in Professionalism
February 23, 2010
With the advent of online services such as YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and Flickr, the world is experiencing new ways to communicate. YouTube hosts videos which broadcasts them fluidly. Vimeo does the same. Flickr is created to share pictures with the world. Finally, twitter is designed to make textual messages about anything the user wants. Topics can include baseball games, burning CDs, driving 50 mph, or even about any of these accounts. As you can see, these online services, which are free, provide a lot of power to a lot of civilians.
Clay Shirky is a character with great public speaking skills. He gives many sophisticated speeches about Web 2.0. In one of his presentations called It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure, he discusses about how information is easy to produce and spreads as an aggregate whole to the mass public. It is very prominent in our era and is always a topic for conversation. Everyone who uses a computer and browses the Internet, or World Wide Web, deals with spam, phishing, spyware, and most frighteningly viruses and worms. Because these are consistent, major problems in our technological world, they are always topics available for discussion. And as a result, the public is psyched to talk about them. What the public doesn’t realize is that it’s not the overload of information that’s driving the conversations, but that of failing to filter the barraging information.
Something that appears on every major site that is somehow related to presenting social media is a privacy policy. It can be found at the bottom of the homepage and every sub page of the website near the terms of service. This has become common to avoid suing charges. The way privacy is monitored online is still a relatively new phenomenon because the fact remains that privacy policies have been in existence for less than ten years, roughly the time when the World Wide Web became big enough to use such policies. Essentially, the current generation is molding the way these policies will be used by our grandchildren. For an easy privacy policy generator, view the video below.
Digital literacy and Web fluency is the way people communicate effectively with each other in the early 21st century. This is because digital mediums, such as cell phones, web pages, and advancing technology, is prominent in developed countries such as the United States of America. As a musician and aspiring industry professional who attempts to upstart his or her career, understanding how to use these digital mediums to leverage him or herself is ever so important. Let’s look at a facet which drives what Clay Shirky was talking about: the rules. For a little background on the content of these written statements, below is an informal list of what is written and implied.
YouTube says that it can record information about the usage of the site including things like channels, groups, favorite videos, what the user subscribes to, what videos are watched, who the user communicates with through YouTube, and any information that the user displays on his or her account. Logging in associates information with users’ YouTube accounts to ensure the quality of service. However, this means that the service places a tag, called a web beacon, in any HTML client. Obviously, the user is voluntarily uploading video content. As a result, this is voluntary disclosure. That means any YouTube user can use this information as it is collected.
Vimeo says that they can collect information which identifies a user. This is called personal information including the name, e-mail address, when the information was provided, IP address, browser information, a log of the visits, and cookies. There is a specific list on how they use this information. Just like most website services, Vimeo makes it easy to see, that is they do not hide it on their website. Even more importantly, Vimeo says it takes appropriate physical, electronic, and other security measures to prevent those who are not authorized to access it that may make it public in almost any way.
“Flickr is a photo sharing community which provides [people] with an easy way to post and share photos online, and add meaningful metadata and comments to photos.” The way Flickr collects information again is voluntary to users. If one chooses, he or she may make their photos public for anyone to see. Likewise, they can be restricted from observation up to as many people as the user chooses. One has the freedom to delete the photos by clicking the delete button and even deleting groups of photos using a batch delete feature. Finally, because Flickr works with Yahoo!, the privacy policy only applies if the user agrees to the Yahoo! Terms of Service and the guidelines.
Last but not least, we have Twitter. The way Twitter functions is based on receiving information from various websites, using SMS, APIs, and other third-party services. As a result, abiding with the privacy policy can get complicated. Like most accounts the user must provide some personal information. This is very basic which includes the user’s name, a username, password, and e-mail address. Additional information can be included which can either be made public or private. Any other information provided on the site, such as tweets, is not a private because the nature of Twitter is to make information public. This means that the privacy policy is limited to making only website content public made public by the user and not the website due to its Information Sharing and Disclosure section in the privacy policy. Nevertheless, Twitter will comply with all laws and regulations respective to the nation in which the user resides even if it means compromising the initial use of the service.
If you are curious about how to make your own privacy policy, view the video below.
According to all of this information, it is clearly visible that it is the freedom of the user of these services to leverage themselves. The pros are publicity with minimal effort, instant communication, and massive networking capabilities. The cons are non-visual expression, rival advancers, and continuous access to technological mediums. Just like pros and cons existed in the past the concept and rendition of challenge still exists. The difference is in the tools which shape the up-starting musician’s career.
