This week’s symposium encouraged the challenging of privacy as a concept. Often social media platforms and networking mediums that experience a high volume of users take advantage of data-mining from their users, meaning users’ information is collected by certain systems in order to sell buy patterns and consumer networks to advertising companies. For example, Facebook collects information from users’ interaction with pages and with other users, which is sold to advertisers in the interest of creating targeted advertisements for specific users, as well as to be sold as valuable research into popular buying patterns to give paying advertisers a significant advantage in the market.

However Facebook and other popular online sites receive constant criticism; claiming such methods are an invasion of privacy. Sounds simple enough? Yeah but what is privacy? I’m sure many of us worry about ‘private messages’ being monitored, phone calls being monitored, behaviour being recorded whether physically via CCTV or through a record of purchase history through payment systems. However, why do we assume that these are private matters? Just because we don’t want anyone else to know about these things, doesn’t mean it’s automatically considered private information, at least not technically (maybe socially).

The definition of privacy is: a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. OR the state of being free from public attention (Oxford Dictionary 2014). Which suggests privacy only occurs in isolation of other people. Therefore, phone calls on the train are not private, so what’s to stop a member of the public joining in the conversation other than social ‘morals’. Same goes for social networking in particular, whilst using a public medium to communicate we assume automatic privacy of our conversation. Bizarre! I think as the world adopts new methods of communication, notions of privacy may slowly cease to exist.