Thursday, May 7, 2009

It's my life!


Hello everyone!

We're dealing with a serious task this week: privacy. Nowadays the information we put on the Internet is easily accessible by everybody and we have to be really careful about what and where we write.

Last November I joined in
Facebook because a friend of mine moved to Madrid and suggested me to keep in contact with her through this social network. So, I became a member myself. At the first time, I only "friended" with her and few others who live abroad or far away from me. However, a lot of people immediately "asked my friendship" and of course I accepted. After a while I realized that I knew things of other people, and vice versa they knew things about me, because we wrote them on Facebook and not because we were friends in the "real life". So, I decided to be more careful about what I was going to write.

What about the pictures we publish? Are they covered by copyright or everyone can use them? After reading the article about Facebook and privacy
One Friend Facebook Hasn't Made yet: Privacy Rights I'm not sure I'll publish anything more... . According to Adam Cohen (the author of this article) : "in the Internet age, people -especially young people- do not care about privacy the way they once did". Perhaps we don't feel it like a problem that people know how we feel today or what time we usually go sleeping. However, we should worry a little bit more about the way our data are widespread and used without our explicit consent.

Facebook isn't a borderline case I fear. We should be really careful about putting personal information on the Internet. However, we should also improve our knowledge of Web technologies and so I don't think the solution to our fears is to avoid using the Internet. On the contrary, we should protect ourselves by attributing authorship to our writings. For this purpose we can use
Creative Commons, the non-profit organization that realized several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. I'm a beginner in this field and I'm talking about things I never tried myself. However, a lot of people use these free licenses and so I think we can do it as well!!


Bye bye,
;) Chiara

2 comments:

  1. Hello Chiara!
    I started to use Facebook for the same reason! A friend of mine who lives in England already used it and told me I should sign up because in that way I would be able to see, for example, her photos: she couldn't send them to me by email! For this reason, I think Facebook is a very useful tool if you want to keep in touch with friends living abroad! I'm not worried about the things my friends in Facebook know about me, but I'm worried about the fact that my personal information can be known by my friends' friends, other members of Facebook, and those people who have the control of this social network!
    I have some doubts concerning your post:
    * "I joined in Facebook" : I'm not sure about the preposition in. My dictionary says that if you consider Facebook as a group/organization you should write "I joined Facebook", while you can write "I joined in" if you consider Facebook as something other people are already doing.
    * "...in the real life" : I'd write "in real life".
    * "I'm not sure I'll publish anything more" : I’d write "I'm not sure I'll publish something again".

    See u in class,
    Ilaria.

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  2. Dear Chiara,
    I think that Sarah gave us many important tools to protect ourselves and our personal info but also to respect the work of others by attributing their true authorship when using them.
    As for the language:
    what do you mean by saying "Facebook isn't a borderline case I fear"?
    I would say "It is not just Facebook that I fear as a borderline case".. but if the meaning changes please let me know. Thanks!:)))
    Bye Arianna

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