Throughout the semester, we have discussed in great lengths about new media and it’s influence in different spectrums of our lives. Some of the new media outlets were Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr,etc. On all of these sites, we are the given a settings/privacy option to customize the viewers interest in who sees their posts. However, this does not mean it guarantees 100% privacy for the individual. For example, I remember once going on Forever21.com and adding couple of clothes in my shopping cart and then closing the tab to come back to later. Later that day, I logged into Facebook and the first advertisement I saw on the right side of my page was to my Forever21 website that displayed the clothes that I have viewed earlier that day. It then began happening every time I visited an online site and went back on Facebook. This shows that my privacy in both ends aren’t fully capable of keeping my page fully secure as I would have liked it to.
The idea of privacy and confidentiality are related to new media because they are both intertwined with each other to create a profit for both ends. First off, our personalized site uses our privacy information to provide services that are individualized and more in synced with each of our own needs. It’s a method that gives new media the upper head in always being a step ahead of its users. Secondly, the sites sells our private information to other businesses to increase their services to the users. It’s almost a cycle where the individual shares its private information on a new media which then gets shared to other new medias to profit off of.
Mano Selvarajah 