W9: Internet Crime

This week, we firstly continued the discussion of “Internet privacy” and compared and contrast to the perception of digital natives and digital immigrants. The formers seemed to understand the the impact of Internet and social networking but they were still can’t be apart from it. The later, however, realized the potential risks so that they were afraid of releasing too much personal information on the web in case the fact that the access of personal information will disturb their original life style. As for me, Internet privacy was seen as a necessary evil because the communication among people in this mobile age relied heavily on Internet. In the age of “big data”, people will keep uploading the relevant, personal, and related information to the long-distance server to show predictable favorably results, which improve your using experience. I used the analogy, we are naked but we still face it, to describe this situation.

Besides, other classmates’s diverse answers were also appealing and interesting. Some people regarded the privacy issue as the limitation of Internet, which was the voluntary work to share to everyone. Another people stated that is is the price of being famous. Still the others expressed their concerns of “where the trusts come from”. This discussion triggered students in this class to think further more about the the possible influences on Internet privacy.

After that, we watched the trailer of the Trument show, which is an old American social sci-fi film. The movie is about the life of Truman Burbank who is living in a virtual reality show on the television, but he didn’t know about it. Connecting the movie to the Internet privacy, we can easily see some similarities and difference on this issue. The world we’re living in is a transparent virtual community like the world of Truman’s so that people can easily find information needed on the Internet. Yet, the main difference is on people’s  awareness of the impact of information usage. Trument in the very beginning didn’t know that he was living in a virtual reality show, and he wash;t conscious of how people are looking at him. Rather, for digital natives, we understander the way how information is transited and transformed; therefore, we have limitation of information spread on the Internet. For example, we will not spread our credit card ID on the Internet for fear of the misuse of the financial account. In addition, we talked about people’s concern of Internet privacy but pitifully, I was handling some technical problem at that time so I didn’t catch much.

We ended the class by beginning a new topic called Internet crime.