Understanding Visual Content Privacy Leaks and its Dangers
This essay is focus on VISUAL CONTENT PRIVACY LEAKS on social media.
As the syllabus describes, the final project is a multimedia composition including text (~3000 words), images, and an audio/video/animated component. The project will respond to course readings in relation to a topic of contemporary concern.
Images: you are not required to create your own images, but you certainly can. The kinds of images you use will depend on your topic of course. You should strive for something more than stock images. Maybe an infographic or chart is the right choice for you. Maybe you’re talking about a specific place or technology or software or platform and an image of it can help us understand better what you want to say.
Video/Audio/Animation: again, you are not required to create your own, though you will probably at least need to do some editing if you are taking up other material. For example, maybe there’s a TED talk or a documentary on your topic. You might want to use a piece of that in your project. Maybe there’s a way for you to interview someone and you can include an audio interview or a Skype/Zoom style video recording. Maybe you want to do a different kind of slide cast to describe a technical process.
(YOU DONT HAVE TO EDITING A VIDEO, JUST FOUND SOME VIDEO THAT RELATED TO THE TOPIC, AND SEND ME THOSE LINKS PLEASE)
Other Requirements
A minimum of three academic sources (e.g., journal articles, essay collections, books/monographs, recorded presentations). If you are uncertain if a source is academic, feel free to contact me. You can use as many other sources (e.g. websites, news media, etc.) as you like.
Formal academic citations. You can use MLA or APA or any other style with which you are familiar. Include citations for any images and other media you use in your project.
Grading Criteria
In addition to the requirements listed above, to meet the expectations for this assignment, your project will
Articulate a question or concern and why you think it is important.
Describe a scholarly conversation occurring around your selected question/concern.
Respond to that question. You don’t need a definitive answer or absolute position. You do need to respond, to articulate how your understanding has developed through research, and to suggest what we do next.
Address your fellow students as the primary audience.
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Understanding Visual Content Privacy Leaks and its Dangers
Introduction
In the age of technology, we all have been exchanging conversations and pieces of information through social media networks as it is the most convenient media. Technological advancement in communication has allowed us to reach people, even from another side of the world, within seconds. Unlike the old days when telegrams would take weeks before arriving at the receiver, technologies made transactions faster and accessible to everyone. Today, even calls have allowed us to see the people to who we are talking. Also, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram enable us to post real-time pictures, videos, and status of ourselves or other people. It means that I can post photos, videos, or any content on my social media accounts immediately after taking them. That is how quickly technology has become over the past years.
However, progress and convenience come with consequences of which we are all potential victims. Because of the easier access that the digital era has given us, malicious intents and actions have also become more convenient and modern. One of the possible internet frauds that anyone can fall victim to is privacy leaks in social media. Privacy leak is the publicity, accidental or not, of personal information or identity through visual contents that are released online. Accidental exposition of information may be posting your credit bill for the vanity without blurring or hiding your card number or other personal details (DeHart and Grant). People who are unaware of the sensitiveness of their information would often commit this accident. Another form of leaked information is hacking of social media accounts that contain private data like birth dates and addresses (Squicciarini, Caragea, and Balakavi). These instances of personal information leakage may cause so much trouble, which could cost anyone, not just money but also lives.
Visual Privacy Content Leaks
A study (DeHart and Grant) has categorized visual contents that often leak online. Leak contents would most likely carry pieces of information that belong to any of the three categories.
The first category is the location. Today, social media platforms, as well as other technological devices, have a feature that enables a person to tag, pin, and show their current location. Most of them would also list the history of your whereabouts. Publicizing your location could hint at the places you frequent and expose information about you (DeHart and Grant). People may identify which bank you go to, which mall, or in which area you live. By exposing your whereabouts, you may attract ill-intent people that target people on the spot.
Identity is the second category that classifies leaks about private pieces of information as well as personal identification. This category includes names, birthdate, address, signatures, and even fingerprint. Leaking personal identification details may lead to more serious issues like identity theft, and deception of other people (DeHart and Grant). Scammers may use your identity to take advantage of other people's money, and property, leaving you with a responsibility you did not do. Exposition of such details may come from accidentally posting documents and identification cards that hold confidential numbers. Some may even hack through your social media accounts to obtain the necessary information for their illegal activities.
Lastly, there are also reports on leaks about assets. It means that people's private properties and financial statuses get exposed to the public or advantageous people (DeHart and Grant). If the information on assets and properties leaks to the public or criminals, it would require quick legal actions to avoid losing all the assets. People would be most careful about documents that carry information about their properties. That is why it is somehow impossible for them to expose it themselves. What could have happened in this kind of leak is that the culprit has found a way to stay close, or at least keep close contact with the person. That is why we must choose the people we keep close to us.
Security, Privacy, and Algorithms
Scams and fraud have become digital operations because most people are users of technology and virtual media. People's diversion to online transactions and interactions have given way for illegal activities to use the platforms to their advantage. Because we all have been switching to doing most of our errands online, ill-intent people have also found a more convenient way of doing their practices.
Just like personal transactions, we also entrust our private pieces of information to the virtual world. It means that our names, birth dates, and even signatures may be floating somewhere in the virtual world (Squicciarini, Caragea, and Balakavi). Though, they go securely and privately directed to the platform with which we transact. As we input our details on online forms or log in to a social media site, we expose our details to virtual space. Of course, we trust that the platform, for instance, a government site or Instagram, secures whatever we give them. Depending on their privacy policy and terms of the agreement, we rely that they keep our details to their sites only. Most of the time, those websites and social media platforms guarantee their privacy policies to be strict and favorable to users. That is, their user security is reliable; they let users know about their rights over personal details and have policies for leaks and disinformation (Squicciarini, Caragea, and Balakavi).
On the part of online platforms like websites, social media platforms, search engines, and the likes, they guarantee security. However, most of the time, especially for social media sites, we publicly post and share anything. For instance, on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we freely share statuses, photos, videos, schedules, events, and even personal thoughts. Especially with the algorithm that these sites have, we attract what we mostly share. Online algorithms would always take note of what we talk about in our posts, shares, or even in a conversation. It takes a few mentions of a brand name in our conversations for an ad to pop up in our timeline (Squicciarini, Caragea, and Balakavi). That is how fast algorithms can read the contents of our social media accounts.
The Danger of Public Posts
When it comes to the security of private information given to social media sites, we can rely on all we want on these platforms to protect our details. Anyway, they are reliable in case there will be a leakage in their sites (Squicciarini, Caragea, and Balakavi). However, visual privacy leakage can happen in many ways. Sometimes, we could accidentally give away what should be private and confidential.
One way to leak your details is by posting online anything that contains personal identifications. In some cases, it happens accidentally to people. That is, they forget or do not notice that there is sensitive information in their posts. Before they know it, the public has already viewed what they have posted. It can happen when we enthusiastically post pictures or videos that contain receipts, bills, cards, or any document that may bear our identification (DeHart and Grant). Although these documents may not be the point of the post or the media, it can still reveal confidential information.
What scammers or frauds would do is zoom in to those media and figure out numbers or letters on your documents. For instance, your video accidentally and briefly shows your credit card number. Even in a few seconds or frames, ill-intent people may find a way to know what those numbers are.
Another way to reveal details that are subject to illegal activities is the mention or exposition of location. It may be trivial, but your whereabouts may play a role in targeting you for unlawful actions. Examples of this exposition are when you post vacation plans, workplace area, and even private address (DeHart and Grant). In most social media sites, there is an option to pin your location, and it will show in your post. Honestly, people would sometimes utilize that option for purposes like an out-of-the-countr...