Personally, anytime I hear the term "class action lawsuit" I think of money. Plain and simple... It is rare to find a class action lawsuit that doesn't garner hundreds of "co-complainants" simply due to the fact that people feel they can make a buck off of someone. Do I honestly believe that little old lady mcgreevy was violated when a picture of her birthday cake was used to sell bakery goods on facebook? No. People tend to see dollar signs when they hear they can get in on suing someone for harming them. (Reminisent of all those late night lawyer ads, asking if you or someone you know has been afflicted with Mesomeloncholic Contradictoritus? Well you may be entitled to substantial compensation for pain you never knew you suffered...) I believe it is outrageously preposterous to think that the thousands of people involved in these class action suits were harmed to the point of needing financial compensation because additional Walmart ads adorned the sidebar of their facebook page. Unless, of course, they are claiming that those ads forced them to bankrupt their families by purchasing adorable home furnishings they were made to believe they simply couldn't live without...In that case it makes perfect sense! O.o
This doesn't mean that we necessarily want our information broadcast, but we have to remember who posted it up there in the first place. If we really wanted privacy we would all still be writing letters to each other with our Ovaltine decoder rings. But we don't, we want ease and convenience, and most of all I think we just want someone to listen...
Sprint has recently begun an advertising campaign that illustrates the idiocy that over half of our daily posting and updating entails, and they are definitely funny! Does the information that we are uploading really have that much value? If your answered is yes, then why would leave something so valuable out in the public domain? Would you leave your car door unlocked when you went to bed for the night? Would you lend your ATM card and pin# to be used by your roommates as a petty cash fund? So why would you use a SOCIAL MEDIA site to share a private detail?
And besides...can you imagine what the life of an NSA agent who has to sort through all the garbage we post everyday is like?
As the owner of a company that researches internet data and analyzes risk on a daily basis, we know that you can't have everything. One of the first things people need to consider is what their acceptable level of risk is. The more freedom you want, and less restrictions, the more risk you have to be willing to assume. If you want as many variables to be controlled as possible, and eliminate as much risk as possible, then you will severely restrict your freedom and have all types of guidelines and procedures to follow. The balance between these two is where we live our lives, it's called reality...and so we live our lives the way we want, noting that with each decision we make we are acting somewhere within that spectrum.
An article by the Redactive Media Group illustrated one such violation. "Jon Tyler, a director and joint owner of E-Resourcing, told Recruiter that incidents in which staff put information about candidates and clients onto their own social networking site and then use it to set up their own agency "could potentially see a devaluation in the goodwill built up by recruiters - especially damage to their name and reputation"...Tyler's comments came after a court case in which the High Court ordered Mark Ions, a former employee of Hays, to disclose emails and documents allegedly sent to or received by professional online network LinkedIn from the Hays computer network...It is alleged that Ions used LinkedIn to retain details of clients and candidates who had registered with Hays. After leaving Hays, Ions set up his own agency..." (Redactive Media Group, 2008)
I think that the old adage, "common sense isn't all that common," comes into play here. It is general knowledge that anything we post on the web is forever "out there." There have been campaigns encouraging people to be careful what they post online. Yet we still "check in" from places we are, and take pictures of our children and the food we eat and post them with regularity. I think we have to remember that we do all this by choice! We have a desire to share our lives, but without fully examining just what that entails. And while I may disagree as to the true nature of this recent uproar for privacy, we have to remember that there are actual laws that can be violated by using "private" information obtained (even if obtained legally).
