Privacy Never Stops Being a Debate

       The government has many policies on data privacy, and frankly the public isn’t aware of most of them. It is also evident that many companies are finding loop holes in privacy laws or just not getting caught. The current policies on data privacy all follow the general guidelines that others cannot wire tap, record conversations on cell phones, or illegally obtain your text messages. It’s all explained in this Privacy Rights website.

        That being said, what about this recent article Facebook Spies, Facebook has accessed smart phone user’s data for their personal use (app making, marketing, trend prediction). But the question is, should it be allowed without penalty? It’s not just Facebook doing this, but any app that a smartphone user downloads could have access to their texts and other personal data.  It is interesting that this hasn’t broken some government regulation and why there aren’t more people complaining.


The Existence of a Loop Hole

       But further research showed that there is most likely no law against this because when users download certain apps and agree to terms of use, the tracking is fair game. An Education News article explains this unfortunate loop hole. Since users grant the application permission, they have complete access. It makes me think that the government could do more to regulate how the data is acquired. In my opinion, it’s not fair to expect app downloaders to read agreements that are X amount of pages long and written in extra small size print. But it’s also due to uninformed users that cause this problem.







Privacy For Businesses

      But stepping away from individual privacy regulations and looking at data privacy from a different perspective, like business, data regulations are still an important issue. More recently in the government, the White House has decided to tackle consumer privacy. In the business world, trust is a very important quality. This bill would allow companies to be involved in the privacy policies and make it more secure. I think that the government is headed in the right here; although it may not regulate all businesses and their procedures at first, once started it might gain more momentum.  

     Although that was an example of corporations encouraged to cooperate with government policies, Verizon shed a different light on it back in October of 2011. Verizon contested the government regulation called net neutrality. This regulation protected free flow of internet and allows mobile users to access sites/data they wanted and don’t let wireless companies control content provided on their network. When companies and the government don’t agree upon certain rules, the loser is the consumer; our data is being controlled or monitored in the meantime. And some may not think this is an issue, but for those of us who like their data privacy will disagree.


What Can Be Said About Privacy So Far

     It seems that there is a lot of back-and-forth between society’s opinions and government internet regulations. It could be possible that the government isn’t able to produce concrete laws as fast as how new technology is rising but it’s also true that not everyone can be happy when there are so many different views out there. Whatever the real issue is, this debate of the validity of government regulations doesn’t show signs of getting resolved any time soon.