Friday 15 March 2013

PEEL Paragraph - Bryan, Yong Jie, Kevin

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Point

The increasing access to the internet has created more problems than solutions in the area of online privacy as it becomes much easier for users to access another person’s personally information on online social platforms.  

Explanation

With the exponential increase in the number of networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter available online, online users would set up their pages, blogs and profiles within these sites, and put up bits of information about themselves. These informations will may help to make connections with people who have similar interests and goals. However, these users might unwittingly publish private information and data about themselves in the process, and despite the constantly improving security of the various social networking sites, hackers, stalkers, and other cyber criminals are still able to obtain these private information and use it against the users. These cyber crimes include blackmail, spam, virus attack, phishing, online scams and frauds. These crimes does not only apply to individual users. Many big companies and major corporations, which heavily rely on these social networking sites for advertisement purposes, have fallen prey to these cyber crimes as well, which resulted in leaked news like secretly revealing a certain company's plans, legal issues, and a loss in sales and profit.


Evidence

An example that can be used to represent this point is Facebook, a social networking site, where internet users can use this social network platform to communicate with friends or find them online. Facebook allow users to put up information about themselves and get to know more about people they just met and keep close contact with them. On the contrary, the personal information put up by the user’s can be easily accessible by anyone on the internet and there would be a high chance of it being used to deceive or blackmail them as most users are not careful of what they put on social networks.  


Linkback/Weighing

As such, the increasing access to information on the internet is actually more of a bane than a boon. The internet made a world a better global community in both a good and a bad way. However, as the internet becomes more advanced, accessing information through the internet has made privacy more of an issue. Otherwise, face-to-face interactions would be a better choice for an socially active person as one won’t have to worry about privacy. (Weighing)

PEEL Paragraph by Ethan, Jovan and Terrence

Point
The increasing access to information on the internet has created more problems than solutions, especially when people’s privacy are involved, information can be easily taken off the internet regarding anyone that could be used against them.

Explanation
As the internet is made available to more people, more people are putting information about anything and everything online. This includes personal information. Although people may think that by setting a privacy setting on the information they put online can protect their information, this is not the case all the time, as this ‘protected’ information can still be used for marketing purposes on sites in which they are stored in. Ever wondered why you receive certain advertisements when you are surfing the Net? This is because sites that store your personal information sell this information to advertising sites, allowing to know what advertisements they should send you. This is why information put online is not always safe and can be used by others if need be. However, some sites, which require personal information to be stored in their databases, do not sell out their users’ information as it has been stated in some form of documentation that they are not allowed to sell out these information without the authorization of the user.


Evidence
A good example would be Facebook, a social networking website that has over one billion users to date. This social networking website allow people to share their information with one another when they are not near each other, which has made it very popular. However, there has been cases where the games that are integrated into the website had accessed the users’ personal information for marketing purposes. There are also situations where random strangers who may not know the user at all have stalked the user, as Facebook can register the users’ location and at what time they were there, which allows people to stalk them. This also allows these stalkers to be able to harm you if they wish by going to wherever you are. However, this ease of sharing information with friends and relatives on Facebook also helps to let them know what is going on around you. And if you are one to reveal your whereabouts through Facebook, and you were to go missing, you can easily be traced and found with the aid of this information being easily accessible.


Linking
Therefore, the increasing access to information on the internet has not been so much of a boon as it has been a bane. With easily accessible personal information online, people can easily make use of these information to cause harm to you or your loved ones. In such a case, one should take precautionary measures and remove all and stop putting up personal information to ensure the safety of you and those around you.


- Ethan, Jovan & Terrence

PEEL Paragraph (Ryan, Hung Kye and Gladys)

Point
The increasing access to information on the internet has created more problems than solutions in the field of personal privacy. The easy access to the vast amount of information notably in social media sites has allowed people to connect with each other more easily but has caused great harms to some as well.

Explanation
The uploading of information online is a popular method to spread urgent messages within different communities. With rapidly increasing amounts of usage on social media websites, there are a lot of personal information that is put up for the public to see. These websites allow one to identify that person and generally know who he or she is easily online. However, there are also integrated functions such as sharing of real-time location which lets users display their actual location on their friends news feeds. This in turn can lead to great danger as strangers may choose to locate and follow this particular person. Therefore there is an increase in chances of the user being stalked or kidnapped. Therefore sometimes security measures are not enough to prevent these acts from happening.

Example
An article on a recent study in blog.kissmetrics.com in the mid-2011s shows that Facebook, a social-networking site has an average of 500 millions active users and there are more than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month. The sharing of information allows friends and relatives to stay in touch with each other. Nevertheless, there still will be lurking hackers who are ready to scam and cheat unprepared users and retrieve their personal information due to easy accessibility of information on the internet.   

Link/ Weighing
Hence, this goes to show that easy access to information on the internet is more of a bane than a boon. Even though the availability of information online is useful for other kinds of purposes, there is always the possibility of stolen information which might lead to loss of privacy and monetary value owing to hackers on social media platforms.
In conclusion, the spreading of information through hard-copy methods or personal communication would be a safer option than sharing it online.

- Gladys, Hung Kye and Ryan