Discuss: Personal security and health issues related to online living – addictio
ID: 3669133 • Letter: D
Question
Discuss: Personal security and health issues related to online living – addictions, bullying, vigilantism, personal health records online
Discuss: Do you think Facebook actually makes us more lonely?
Discuss: The policy implications of cloud computing
There are countless issues with online living and the true question is what issues are there that don't exist in real life. For instance bullying exists both online and offline with the major problem being that the bullying can happen at any time online while in real life it will only happen when you are out and about. While it may be controversial I don’t consider these problems with the internet. Instead in my opinion these are issues with society that are now occurring on the internet as a new medium. However, to answer the question the health issues are the same as anything else that can be abused. People have been known to commit suicide from bullying both online and on the internet, they suffer from withdraw when removed from anything they are addicted to, and their records can be stolen anywhere. However, with the internet this can happen at any time and it never stops. As a result these problems might be magnified because it is so much harder to get away from the internet.
I have not had a Facebook for six years so I don't know from personal experience what it is like today. However, in my opinion Facebook can increase the feeling of loneliness because you see everyone else enjoying life while you spend all of your time on the computer watching others. However, the opposite can be true as well where someone suffering from loneliness can reconnect with long lost friends and obtain the social needs. To put this into perspective one of the major concerns when text messaging became popular was that we no longer hear others voices. As a result we are more disconnected from our friends and the fear was that people will not longer connect with others the same. However, this proved to be false because the ability to send texts enabled us to be social when we might not be near anyone that we could talk to.
Cloud computing has been an interesting development because it is now possible to outsource our computing needs to the cloud. As a result every company doesn't need to buy and manage a server farm greatly lowering the cost of computing. Although, the technology means that large amounts of data must be accessible to the third company and they can't always be trusted. This also means that hackers don't need to target the company. It might be more profitable to target the computing providers and steal the data from all companies that buy the services rather than attack the individual companies. This means that policies need to control what sort of data can be sent to the cloud as well as the security level of the companies you are sending the data to. If the companies are only being used to processing publicly available data for big data analysis then the policy could be lax. However, if using the cloud to handle processing for an online market place then policies should be in place to control what companies can be used for the cloud
Explanation / Answer
Answer 1 -
Technology offers extraordinary opportunities for all of society including children and young people. The internet allows for global exploration which can also bring risks, often paralleling the offline world. Video gaming offers a range of exciting interactive experiences for children, however some of these are designed for adults. There is a generational digital divide between parents and children which means that many parents do not feel empowered to manage risks in the digital world in the same way that they do in the ‘real’ world.
Adults are increasingly spending their discretionary time on the Internet, and children and adolescents ”spend more time with media than they do in any other activity except for sleeping”. However, because of the easy and often private access to children that the Internet offers, it has provided a new medium through which child exploitation, bullying, vigilantism, maltreatment, and sexual and emotional abuse can propagate. Bullies leave themselves more open to vigilantes than they may think. After all, the same impulses that allow for cyberbullying -- the anonymity, the lack of face-to-face contact -- also allow for cybervigilantes to exact revenge. Broadly speaking, the Internet gives predators instant access to a large group of potential victims, as well as the opportunity to create their own ‘communities’ to exchange ideas and reinforce their prurient desires.
When it comes to finding and luring potential victims, the Internet provides numerous opportunities and advantages for predators. Chat rooms, role playing games (e.g. World of Warcraft), virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life), and social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), facilitate predators’ agendas by allowing participants to remain anonymous or create false identities. By disguising their true identity and motives, predators are able to build long-term online relationships with their targeted victims prior to any attempt to promote physical contact.
Answer 2 -
Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.
Lonelier people weren’t inherently more likely to go online, either; a recent review of some seventy-five studies concluded that “users of Facebook do not differ in most personality traits from nonusers of Facebook".But, somehow, the Internet seemed to make them feel more alienated. A 2010 analysis of forty studies also confirmed the trend: Internet use had a small, significant detrimental effect on overall well-being. One experiment concluded that Facebook could even cause problems in relationships, by increasing feelings of jealousy.
We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment.Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.
But, as with most findings on Facebook, the opposite argument is equally prominent. Social networks are a way to share, and the experience of successful sharing comes with a psychological and physiological rush that is often self-reinforcing. The prevalence of social media has, as a result, fundamentally changed the way we read and watch: we think about how we’ll share something, and whom we’ll share it with, as we consume it.
Answer 3 -
Cloud computing can be de- fined as a push in designing services where information is stored and processed on the Internet (i.e., “the cloud”) usually via massive large scale data centers which can be accessed remotely through various clients and platforms. Cloud computing itself has often been referred to as a conglomeration of ideas such as Software as a Service, Web 2.0, grid computing, and utility computing. In essence, cloud computing is an umbrella concept which attempts to synthesize and encapsulate this over arching movement of access anywhere, process anywhere while abstracting the entire process to the user masking it in the cloud.
These are few imlications that include both new policy issues unique to cloud computing and existing technology/policy issues, including:
• Jurisdiction and regulation (Where and how will it be governed?)
• Ownership of Data (Who owns the data in the cloud?)
• Data Portability (Can you migrate between services?)
• Data Retention/Permanence (What happens to data over time?)
• Intellectual Property
• Security and Privacy (How is data secure and protected?)
• Reliability, Liability and Quality of Service (What happens when the cloud fails?) - With more services being built on top of cloud computing infrastructures, an outage or failure can create a domino effect, effectively taking down large amounts of Internet services and Internet based applications. In cases of failure, what forms of arbitration exist for stakeholders, and what is the responsibility of cloud providers?
• Government Surveillance (How much data can the government get from the cloud?)
• Monopolization of computing -. While few years ago this would seem laughable to many in the IT community, with cloud computing this may no longer be a funny mis-prediction, but some what eerily truthful. Cloud computing data centers, plainly speaking, are massive amounts of computers all functioning together as one supercomputer. With economics to scale and network effects, we may see a future with only a handful of cloud computing providers in which the world will do their computing on . Therefore, there are concerns of the potential for cloud monopolies to form.
• Net Neutrality
The policy implications may appear to be endless, but solutions do exist. Given the potential impact of cloud computing, these problems will not remain unresolved and will eventually be answered. A proactive approach is needed, in the form of education and policy analysis, is necessary to ensure that cloud computing will succeed and that vested stakeholders are protected