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/