Week 2 - Privacy

Some people worry about their privacy on the internet and because of rapid advance in technology sector, it became norm for companies to collect your personal data and even give those data to other companies for advertising and statistics purposes. People checking in their current location on services like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare is common practice. However, with all these data about you and your family can be used against you. While ago, there was a article about analytics firm who was collecting data from their customers of their location data, user information, and what kind of devices they are using. This sounds pretty legitimate until you hear the line where it says, users were not asked to give out these data. In other words, users were unaware of their personal data being sent to this firm. This is pretty scary. 

Computer generation are more willing to accept that in order to use social services to it's full extent, you need to give up some of your privacy. However, people who came before computer and people who need to protect their personal data are worried about increasing threats to their personal data. My idea of augmented reality app is based on the whole concept of social media and private data people have. Most of it's features are based on GPS location, and users data that can be shared with others. This might raise some concerns. However, I believe it's necessary step to advance our technology. People will still have option to use this application or not. There are people who do not want to share their data with others but there are also people who's willing to share more data with others. To embrace both sides, users can choose what they want to share, when they want to share, and if they want to be asked every time augmented reality app wants to share your data with others. By asking users every time or how they want to share their data, their privacy is still safe and is up to the users to decide.  

The good example is Google+. Although it has same concepts and are direct competitor against Facebook, features like Circles and ability to post things and share updates with the certain group you assigned is welcome concept. Facebook just rolled out similar update to it's service so I think as companies realize the importance of private data more and more, we will gain more control over our privacy over time. Most of these privacy concerns can be solved if companies provide solid guideline for what kind of data are being shared and how they can manage their private data without hiding under confusing settings menu. It's understandable that companies like Facebook need users to open up their data more more but there is no excuse for them to push out new services without properly asking their customers if they are fine with personal data being exposed.