The Use of the Internet - Term Paper Example

How the internet has caused an ethical debate on our information privacy By Author Date Introduction Up till now, no other technology has received as quick recognition and acceptance as the Internet. Soon after its emergence it became a source of attraction to not only individuals but also the business organizations and governments. In this way, it has brought significant changes to society. At the present, the Internet is being used for a large number of reasons. Though, it has brought a large number of benefits and opportunities to this world however, there are also some risks and challenges associated with its usage. In addition, the benefits of the Internet cover up the associated challenges. The basic purpose of this research is to discuss the privacy concerns of the Internet. This paper presents a detailed analysis of effects that have been posed by the Internet on people. This paper discusses advantages and ways people and organizations are currently making the use of the Internet. However, the internet is being heavily used by the people for carrying out illegal activities such as criminal acts with the aim of causing harm. The Internet The internet mostly acknowledged basically “the Net,” the Internet is a universal structure of computer networks-a network, in which users at any one computer can receive information from any other computer (as well as they can communicate straightforwardly with users at different computers in different locations). Nowadays, the Internet is a, supportive, public, self-financing facility available to hundreds of millions of users internationally. Actually, the Internet makes use of a part of the whole resources of the presently accessible public telecommunication networks. In principle, what differentiable the Internet its use of a collection of protocols known as TCP/IP (Turban, et al., 2005, p. 71). The appearance and growth of the Internet has made business markets more workable and competitive than ever before. With the Internet, every organization (small, medium, and large) in the world is potentially a local competitor. At the present, all the business marketers understand that the Internet is a precious instrument or technology for extending reach to international markets and dealing customers in a superior way (Summers, et al., 2003, p. 67). The impact of Internet on People Without a doubt, the internet has turned out to be a significant part of our lives as it has completely changed our lives. Without a doubt, one of the most attractive innovations that the internet has brought to our world is its support for the communication. It has provided an excellent support for the communication by offering wonderful tools and technologies. This section presents a discussion on the impact of the Internet on society before and after the emergence of the Internet (Norton, 2001): Communication In the past, before the emergence of the Internet, communication process was very time-consuming and costly. People had to use traditional ways of communication whether for personal reasons or for business purposes. They had to write letters or make telephone calls, which took a lot of time to get response of respondents. Access to data and information In the same way, they had to read a large number of books in order to get the solution of their problems or conduct research on various topics. Searching and finding an appropriate answer was a problem. Gap between people Before the emergence of the internet the entire society was scattered and all the people from all over the world were unaware of the status and news of other countries. There were restrictions of borders and boundaries among people which restricted the communication among people and increase gap between them. Ways of Entertainment Before the emergence of the internet, people had to use the traditional source of entertainment which were limited at that time. Shopping Before the emergence of the Internet, people had to spend a lot of time in travelling and searching for a desired product. It required a lot of time to move from one location to another in order to find a specific product. No support for business Before the emergence of the Internet, people were restricted to carry out business activities within the boundaries of their country. They had to use traditional ways of marketing and communication with customers. With these methods, they were able to attract only the local customers. After the Emergence of the Internet Without a doubt, with the emergence of the internet, the communication has become cost effective and its quality is improved. In fact, the use of the Internet allows people to get connected with their customers and employees from any place such as home, airport or any other location. Now people have easy and cost effective ways for shopping, communication and entertainment. In this scenario, the internet has modernized the entire world especially the business industry. Now with the internet organizations have countless options to revolutionize their business structure and environment. Though, the internet has modernized every walk of society but its majority of applications are seen in the business. This section presents a detailed analysis of the impact of internet on businesses (Ray, 2004, p. 269). The Internet technology offers so many facilities. First of all, the Internet works as a transportation device for data, next, the Internet is a system that establishes connections with any computer linked to it. If an organization grasps the control of these two rules or facilities, that can utilize this technology with the utmost aptitude to improve the business (Ray, 2004, p. 269). Various Concerns The emergence of this technology also brought some additional concerns and issues those were not present before the Internet. At the present, people are more and more concerned with issues that emerge due to privacy and security as well as with other attacks like that spam, viruses or other aggressive material and contents. In this scenario, a variety of issues also emerge in the context of legal and social perspective. Now people are worried about the issues for instance how they can deal with intellectual property on the Internet (Ray, 2004). Internet and the issue of the privacy As internet has provided its users with lots of benefits and facilities but at the same time it has raised ethical debate on the information privacy of the user. The debate includes two type of privacy issues. First, internet is a source where millions of people from different parts of the world posting their personal information. This aggregation of personal information on different websites are exploited which violates personal privacy of the user. Many websites make that personal information public without even asking the consent of the user. The personal information includes contact details, personal messages, address, and information about the membership, pictures, video clips, personal recognition information and many other details. This information can be easily assessable to everyone. One can be easily located by using any search engine. One can also create additional composite records of any person. Secondly, the other privacy issue is online monitoring of the internet user. Many third parties use the personal data of the internet user’s. Users think that their personal data is restricted but in reality it is not any third party can effortlessly use it anytime for any purpose. Online privacy is vulnerable due to the following risks which include cookies, profiling or tracking and various spywares that are used by third party to collect personal data of the users (Bennett, 2001). In addition, various databases that have personal information of the internet users are merged to produce new data structures, in this way a new composite record is produced. Like financial, medical and insurance records of the customers are demanded by different credit card companies; just to know about the spending and expenses of is prospective customers. Merging or combining database information creates serious privacy concerns of the users. These merged records are used for generating further perceptions to exploit it. Moreover, cross checking methods have also applied to match the personal information from the required information, this kind of cross checking and matching techniques is mostly used by the government agencies to check or verify the criminal record without taking permission from the user. Sometime, this cross checking method creates problem for the innocent user even if the record does not match but it can create suspiciousness for further investigations. In addition this is an unethical because it promotes stereotype which leads intrusive investigation (Tavani, 2004). Similarly data mining is another technique that is used to violate information privacy of the internet users. Data mining is a process through which one can automatically searching large amount of data. The techniques and tools that facilitate searching process in data mining can comprise machine learnings, statistical analysis and various pattern recognition mechanisms. In this scenario, the new information and data becomes more demanding than the old ones. As new data and information uncover different interests of new prospective customers. Similarly like the merging data technique, data mining can also create stereotype. For instance, Credit Card Company uses data mining technique and explores that a group with certain zip code are mostly loan defaulter and bankrupt, after analyzing the whole situation the credit card company decides not to extent the limit of the credit card of the people specifically from that zip code area. In other words, data mining is a technique of data gathering of internet user that may violate individual privacy and can also create stereotype of specific group that is unethical and biased. Thus, the practice and implementation of ethical policies is necessary to deal with this issue (Royakker, 2004). In addition, surveillance is also used to undermine the privacy of the internet users. Surveillance is the organized monitoring of people of the specific group for definite purpose. This kind of observation creates pressure on that specific group which is considered as unethical and immoral. Most of the times, state uses this surveillance technique to protect national security and eliminate crime from the country. For this purpose state makes contracts from various online website and companies for giving tracking record of observed group. Even many sociologist like David Lyon argued in the favor of surveillance technique. He believed that surveillance is an important form of observation that can be useful to reduce the crime rate of the society (Lyon, 2001). Furthermore, dataveillance is a new form of surveillance and a big challenge for the internet users that is used to gather and processed large amount of personal data. In dataveillance, the monitoring is done of user’s actions and communication. For instance if a person send inappropriate message or mail to anyone which contains some illegal and threatening content then it can be easily tracked by the state and state can take legal action against such a mail or message. If it is useful in monitoring the criminal activities and personal data of the criminals at the same time it all raises ethical debate because if users know they are under constant surveillance by the state, they start believing that state puts restrictions on them (Clarke, 1988). Likewise, when the internet user uses any world wide web or any internet site to browse something, he have to enter some biometric authentications as well. Sometimes website asks for giving personal pin codes, credit card number, national identity card number, and voice or fingerprint recognition. When user leave after giving such a personal information, this information is act as digital finger prints. One can easily recognized and identified. Furthermore the personal privacy violation is not only done by giving and leaving personal data on the websites, but also from sharing data without knowing the privacy policies of the websites. Some website are working only to collect data and theft personal information, the websites must be viewed carefully before giving any type of personal data Thus, evaluating website authentication is the responsibility of the internet user for ensuring his own security (Himma, 2007). In addition, the credit card information that is needed in E-commerce is also used by different companies to tracking their potential customer but revealing credit card number sometimes proves threatening and risky. As Georgetown University survey found that giving and sharing credit card number on internet is very risk (Chiu, 2000) In this global world, different privacy disputes and concerns appear from the tension between the interest of corporation and people’s right to privacy and government in tracking personal data information. Privacy protection is a big demand and need of the internet users. Privacy protection includes the realization of different privacy laws and policies. It also demands the clear data protection policies; these policies are formulated to regulate the use, harvesting, storage, processing and exchange of personal data. But this privacy policy is badly affected because of the keen interest of corporates and state in the people personal information .Now due to poor data protection policies and surveillance activities of the corporation and the state have made the personal information data vulnerable (Langheinrich, 2001). Privacy of personal information of the internet user’s is an ethical issue that is why it is valuable for many reasons. It is needed to defend the user from a wide variety of external privacy concerns like that insult, defamation, offense, theft, blackmailing, harassment, manipulation and ridicule. Similarly, many authors have argued that privacy is an articulation to protect the core values of the security of the user, which aims only to protect the user from all kinds of harms and damages that can done by anyone. It is also considered as a pre-condition of the autonomy of the user. If user are continuously examined they hesitating in experimenting and trying new things on the internet and avoid to use new feature because they have a fear of constantly subjected to observation by the third party (Westin, 1967). Conclusion This paper has presented a detailed analysis of a new technology “Internet”. Now the internet is not a new term for people as this technology has a significant place in their lives and the majority of them cannot think of surviving without this technology. Now people use internet for a variety of purposes. Like every technology, internet is also just a technology and it depends on people how they make use of this technology for the betterment of their society and people. This technology can be used by people for positive purposes as well as negative purposes. For instance, an individual can use to launch a business and earn money while some people use it for negative tasks such as hacking and attacking on others’ systems. This paper has discussed various aspects associated with this technology. Though this technology comes with some of the negative aspects as well, however the benefits of this technology compensate all the disadvantages. So the survival of the societies has become impossible without the Internet. However, in the past few years, there have emerged serious security and privacy concerns associated with the use of this technology. This paper has presented a detailed discussion on the current trends existed in the context of the Internet. However, there is need for strict rules and laws to improve the security and privacy concerns of the Internet. References Bennett, C. 3., 2001. Cookies, Web Bugs, Webcams and Cue Cats: Patterns of Surveillance on the World Wide Web.. Ethics and Information Technology, 3(3), p. 195 – 208 . Chiu, A. S., 2000. The Ethics of Internet Privacy, s.l.: s.n. Clarke, 1988. Information Technology and Dataveillance.. Communications of the ACM , 31(5), pp. 489-512. Himma, 2007. Readings on Internet Security: Hacking, Counterhacking, and Other Moral Issues. s.l.:Jones & Bartlett. Langheinrich, 2001. Privacy by Design - Principles of Privacy-Aware Ubiquitous Systems. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, Volume 2201, pp. 273 - 291 . Lyon, D., 2001. Surveillance Society. Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham UK: Open University Press. Norton, P., 2001. Introduction to Computers. 4th ed. Singapore: McGraw-Hill. Ray, R., 2004. Technology Solutions for Growing Businesses. New York: American Management Association (AMACOM). Royakker, V. W. a., 2004. Ethical Issues in Web Data Mining.. Ethics and Information Technology, Volume 6, pp. 129-140. Summers, J. et al., 2003. Essentials of Marketing. Australia: Thomosn. Tavani, 2004. Ethics and Technology: Ethical Issues in an Age of information and Communication Technology. s.l.:s.n. Turban, E., Leidner, D., McLean, E. & Wetherbe, J., 2005. Information Technology for Management: Transforming Organizations in the Digital Economy. New York: Wiley. Westin, A. F., 1967. Privacy and Freedom. New York: Atheneum. Read More

This section presents a discussion on the impact of the Internet on society before and after the emergence of the Internet (Norton, 2001): Communication In the past, before the emergence of the Internet, communication process was very time-consuming and costly. People had to use traditional ways of communication whether for personal reasons or for business purposes. They had to write letters or make telephone calls, which took a lot of time to get response of respondents. Access to data and information In the same way, they had to read a large number of books in order to get the solution of their problems or conduct research on various topics.

Searching and finding an appropriate answer was a problem. Gap between people Before the emergence of the internet the entire society was scattered and all the people from all over the world were unaware of the status and news of other countries. There were restrictions of borders and boundaries among people which restricted the communication among people and increase gap between them. Ways of Entertainment Before the emergence of the internet, people had to use the traditional source of entertainment which were limited at that time.

Shopping Before the emergence of the Internet, people had to spend a lot of time in travelling and searching for a desired product. It required a lot of time to move from one location to another in order to find a specific product. No support for business Before the emergence of the Internet, people were restricted to carry out business activities within the boundaries of their country. They had to use traditional ways of marketing and communication with customers. With these methods, they were able to attract only the local customers.

After the Emergence of the Internet Without a doubt, with the emergence of the internet, the communication has become cost effective and its quality is improved. In fact, the use of the Internet allows people to get connected with their customers and employees from any place such as home, airport or any other location. Now people have easy and cost effective ways for shopping, communication and entertainment. In this scenario, the internet has modernized the entire world especially the business industry.

Now with the internet organizations have countless options to revolutionize their business structure and environment. Though, the internet has modernized every walk of society but its majority of applications are seen in the business. This section presents a detailed analysis of the impact of internet on businesses (Ray, 2004, p. 269). The Internet technology offers so many facilities. First of all, the Internet works as a transportation device for data, next, the Internet is a system that establishes connections with any computer linked to it.

If an organization grasps the control of these two rules or facilities, that can utilize this technology with the utmost aptitude to improve the business (Ray, 2004, p. 269). Various Concerns The emergence of this technology also brought some additional concerns and issues those were not present before the Internet. At the present, people are more and more concerned with issues that emerge due to privacy and security as well as with other attacks like that spam, viruses or other aggressive material and contents.

In this scenario, a variety of issues also emerge in the context of legal and social perspective. Now people are worried about the issues for instance how they can deal with intellectual property on the Internet (Ray, 2004). Internet and the issue of the privacy As internet has provided its users with lots of benefits and facilities but at the same time it has raised ethical debate on the information privacy of the user. The debate includes two type of privacy issues. First, internet is a source where millions of people from different parts of the world posting their personal information.

This aggregation of personal information on different websites are exploited which violates personal privacy of the user.

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