Fighting the Good Fight

Of course over the past few years we have all heard that individuals have lost job opportunities to other applicants due to what they had posted on their personnel Facebook pages. Employers would “stalk” potential employees and see if they could dig up any dirt before hiring the individual.¹ At the time this was considered a huge breach of privacy that breaks the barrier between work and play. We should all have the ability to keep our work lives separate from our personal lives. It now seems that employers weren’t satisfied in only vetting out perspectives employees secretly and are now directly asking for access to individual’s accounts. So now they would not merely have access to what the public can view but also have the ability to edit and view private information on someone’s account. Not only this but they not limiting themselves to perspective employees, they are now asking for passwords from individuals who have already been hired.

However there is good news. Facebook has come out to protect us from this breach of our privacy. This is partially to keep users on their site but also to help the individuals involved. Facebook openly warned that there could be legal ramifications should any information from a Facebook account be released. As for future directions, they have also confirmed that they are in talks with policy makers as to if there is any way to go after the known employers who asked for passwords. This to me is the first time I have ever heard of a company going out of their way to protect their users. Of course if this breach were also a breach of Facebook’s user agreement this action would seem less thoughtful. However this doesn’t seem to be the case Facebook is actually going out of their way to allow their service to be fun and carefree.

You can read more about what’s going on in links 2 and 3 below. Many other news sites have also chosen to cover this story as well.

¹http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/03/employers_get_o.html

²http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/facebook-password-employers/

³http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-warns-employers-not-demand-passwords-141726769.html

Quality of Life

Up till now I have focused on how technology affects our lives and society with regards to rights, privacy, etc... However to today I will focus on how technology affects society in a different way. Specifically how technology improves quality of life of individuals.

As a first example I'll use that of prosthetics. For decades people have had purely mechanical prosthetics (while this is a type of tech it is not what I will focus on). However now there is a new way technology could help improve the quality of life of amputees. (Please see the first link below) There is now a technology that could potentially interface a mechanical prosthesis with a nervous system. This would be a huge leap forward in science. Amputees could not only have better control of artificial limbs but potentially also feel with them. This at one point in our history was more or less considered purely impossible science fiction but now seems to be growing closer to reality. There are tons of examples of how advances using computers and technology as a whole affect people who have been harmed. As another example please see the second link below. It describes how technology can be used to give site to the blind.

This first example is truly sensational and realistic. My second example however is much more broad. Before the internet was created there were many different ways for individuals to get daily information. By daily information here I mean traffic, weather, sports scores, etc... Individuals could listen to the radio, read the paper or retrieve the information by other means. Nowadays however almost everyone uses some form of internet related application to get this daily info. Most people don't realize just how much this technology has improved and simplified our quality of life. We no longer need to wait for traffic reports. We have up to date weather. We have up to date news. We have live scores. And of course the list goes on. In the third link below dependence on internet technology is explored. It is shocking to see just how much it affects us. I personally would not want to go back to a world without this ease.

To conclude, technology greatly affects our quality of life. Some ways are more important than others. Technology can restore use to once lost part of our selves. It also helps simplify our lives and thereby gives us time for other things. Technology improves our lives in too many ways to count.

http://www.gizmag.com/nerve-prostheses-interface-scaffolds/21646/

http://www.theithacajournal.com/article/20120302/NEWS01/203020344/Alternative-Tompkins-Cornell-grad-helps-deliver-patterns-light-blind-people?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE

http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com/

Aimed Advertising

On March 1st Google made a huge modification to their privacy practices and policies. The main problem the public has seemed to voice is that these changes allow Google to track usage across most of their services. This doesn't immediately seem like a bad thing. For instance preferences in one service can transfer over to another. The problem arises when you go deeper and realize that it is not only preferences that go across services but also usage. This means that if you search on Google for skiing locations and supplies, other Google services would know these tendencies. The main goal here is that Google can now tailor ads and search results to the individual.

Technology is not always morally perfect, there will always be avenues for it to be misused or abused. While this is one of those circumstances, it is by far not the first. Even more interestingly it is not the first technology to be used for aimed advertising. While Google has taken the brunt of the backlash in recent days for aimed advertising there are other technologies both in development and already released that aim to achieve similar things. There are many forms of aimed advertising out there that we see everyday, of course not all of them use technology. However, in the second link below there is another method that would use technologically aided aimed advertising. There is also talk that gaming systems equipped with cameras may also start using visual information and game selections for aimed advertising. Aimed advertising is also a staple in many futuristic science fiction films potentially showing where things are headed.

Aimed advertising mixed with technology is not morally correct and the public reaction to it in any form shows this. It is mainly immoral because these aimed advertisements can be focused at children. However we keep using these services proving that it is something we will just have to deal with. This is because it doesn't really harm adults in any way. Rather it just uses information we would rather be kept secret.

https://www.google.ca/intl/en/policies/privacy/
http://intel.cognovision.com/cognovision/news/83-intel-aim-suite-featured-in-qvending-machine-20q
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/15/microsoft-exec-caught-in-privacy-snafu-says-kinect-might-tailor/

Collaboration at it's Best

In recent days we have all heard much about acts and bills that could potentially change the internet as we know it. There have been several major ones including SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, C10, etc... The world at larges' reaction to these has been anything but minor and now has taken even further steps.

The internet has always been a place to share and express opinions and information. The above pieces of legislation though trying to accomplish "honorable" things just handcuffed individuals rights and powers of internet usage. While SOPA and PIPA have both been stopped it seems that society (or rather a very large group of individuals) have decided to use technology to further stop similar acts from being a threat again. The Free Internet Act is a huge collaborative effort under way within the Reddit community where everyone can put in their two cents. This is what, in my opinion, the internet is meant for, collaboration and sharing of information. It is also partially the reason society has embraced internet technology.

You can read more about the thread using the link below (or find the Reddit thread within and make some suggestions of your own).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/22/the-free-internet-act-reddit_n_1291853.html

Technology as a Fad

As stated before this blog is intended to illustrate the relation between computers/technology and society. However sometimes this relation causes negatives reactions. Part of technology's impact on society is that most people think the latest hardware is a social requirement. This is in fact true. For instance cellphones and computers are now a part of everyday life and a business person without one of these devices is at a disadvantage to another that does. Similarly a doctor using outdated methods would not be at the top of their field. However we have come to a point in the technological world where this social pressure for the latest tech has gone a bit too far.

As a primary example let's use the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out it was a revolutionary concept. It was simple to use, powerful, and quite simply revolutionised the smart phone industry. It lead to several successors each more powerful than the one before (a trend that is quite common in the industry). However where this story takes a turn for the worse is the social reaction that came with each release of the devices. Consumers would flock to buy the latest version despite having fully functional versions of older models. See [1]. This is not getting the latest hardware in a healthy way, it is getting the same type of hardware with new trim.

Similar practices occur in the entertainment and automotive industries as well as elsewhere in the technological industry. For instance having already purchased a version of a film (say Lord of the Rings) individuals will go and buy the same movie but as an extended blu-ray version. The movie has not changed but has merely been updated.

The problem is, we all do similar things to this in one way or another. We do not need these upgrades and yet we pay obscene amounts of money for them. The only question is, is it social pressure or a need for new things on our part?


[1]http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/25/77-of-iphone-4-sales-were-upgrades/

Blogs

    Blogs have been a common place item on the internet for appropriately a decade. Since their first inception in the mid 90’s the number of blogs has grown to over 156 million public blogs as of February 16th 2011. [1] Blogs are a free, easy and a readily available resource to anyone who has an opinion. While these opinions may not always be popular, blogs are an excellent tool from which society benefits.

    Some argue that blogs have passed their prime, but with the staggering number illustrated above, it is easy to see this is far from the truth. 

“In the 10 years since the first site known as a "weblog" went online, the blog has matured from a geek niche to the internet's dominant publishing paradigm.” 

Blogs are not only popular, but one of their main benefits is just how many uses they have. This is to say blogs need not only differ on their subject matter. Blogs can also be used to discuss interests, deploy advertisements, act as chatrooms, etc… This makes them not only a good tool but a diverse tool as well.

    An example of a popular blog at work is the Huffington post. It is one of the world’s most popular news sites and is in fact partially a blog. Not only this, but it is also respected showing just how much stock people put into blogs. This just reinforces how versatile and beneficial blogs can be.

    For further discussion and information about blogs please visit reference links 3 or 7. The first link shows just how many benefits blogging has to offer an individual. The second shows the versatility of blogging.

^[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

^[2] http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2007/12/blog_anniversary

^[3] http://www.stayonsearch.com/21-key-benefits-of-blogging

^[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Huffington_Post

^[5] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/

^[6] http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/blogs

^[7] http://www.blogopreneur.com/2007/01/10/10-practical-ways-to-use-a-blog/

Introduction

   The articles within this blog will focus on personal views of how society and technology, more specifically computer related technology, relate. To get a better meaning of this I shall expand. In the world we live in today there are more and more pieces of technology that surface every day. These technologies inevitably have an impact on how we live our lives. This technology I refer to could be anything from a new piece of software to a revolutionary new item that we cannot, as of yet, even begin fathom.


    The effects these leaps have on society could vary, both having good repercussions and bad. We saw the creation of Facebook completely change how people communicate on a daily basis. A more visible contrast of effects is how the invention of computers themselves impacted society through various means. Computers have aided in the advancement of almost every field. For instance medicine would not be where it is today without the use of computers to view scans of differing kinds. However, one of the earliest computers (ENIAC) aided in the creation of the nuclear bomb. [1]

    To summarize, in this blog I aim to illustrate the effects new and recent technologies have had on society. The technologies will have some computer related functionality and the effects I discuss will either highlight the technologies’ benefit or their harm. Finally, these effects may be discussed in various ways, from an informative description of a topic itself to a real world event.

^[1] http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt4.htm