Online Privacy Issues All Over The World

Online privacy issues occur globally all over the world. The most popular case is the Facebook privacy incidence. Famous social media group Facebook had a privacy setting bug that automatically changes the setting that regulate who can see people’s posts. In other words, people had to change the setting manually, if not, posts will be shared with 14 million Facebook users. The group said “the software glitch changed the setting to “public”. This issue happens because humans make the site and all people make mistakes. Even though Facebook had no motives and did not intentionally do this, huge amounts of users can get affected and see the damage by the accident they made. The users’ personal data were all exposed to every Facebook users. And it is not assured that there won’t be any hackers between those users.

This incident can give short and long term effects. Short term effect would be that users’ privacy will leak to other users and perhaps some hackers. Long term effect would be that with this momentum, the hackers can catch the weakness of Facebook and try hacking in for people’s data, which will continue to happen for quite a long time. However, this issue can be seen from different perspectives.

First perspective will be from the company. The company will consider this as a blunder and apologies toward the Facebook users. From the Facebook users, they even though it is just a blunder, they will most likely take in the fact negatively and criticize the management skill of the company. Another case where someone became a scapegoat of social media. A photo of the victim’s face and house was posted on a social media from her friend from the party. However, after the post, one of the other friend that was not invited to the party used the photo and made a fake web page and exposed to other not invited friends and irrelevant friends. Starting with that, people starting escapading to her house. This issue exists due to lack of security of posts. Her friends who dislike her caused the issue, and grew serious and her personal informations leaked to more people that are irrelevant. Their motives were to taunt the girl and try to be cool with other friends. However, eventually, the friends who made the fake web page got traced down by the school and finally got deleted. There is no specific winner or loser in this case, since even though the page no longer exists, the victim already got exposed and saw the damage.

Now that I’ve explored the global perspectives and issues, locally, in Hong Kong we have an issue as well. Hong Kong’s one of the biggest Network companies called “Broadband” got hacked in by an unknown person. The Broadband contains 380,000 customers’ personal data and this incident did not happen long time ago, which is 2018, April. The operator of the company responded to this issue and said that they “had no indication who it might be or where the attack originated.” They added that it was an experienced approach. The existence of this issue is unknown. However, the conjecture is that it was because the company had a lot of valuable information like phone numbers, addresses, credit card details, and other more personal data. In other words, the hacker might have been seeking customers’ personal data for his personal benefits. Yet, this issue did not occur only because of the hacker. The privacy was not firmly secured. Thus, when an online privacy issue happens, it’s not only caused by the hackers. People who keep information also have responsibilities to it. Since this incident is considered as quite a serious complication, it has short and long term effect to Hong Kong and the citizens.

First of all, now that Hong Kong citizens know how dangerous it is to keep their personal data online is, short term effect to this would be that the hackers approached to the private information that is not supposed to be leaked and might be used maliciously. Long term effect is that now, the company and the citizens will be anxious about this. The company surely strengthen their security, but that will take quite a long time, and during that, the hackers will approach other platforms, and do furthermore damages to the nation. This issue can be viewed from different perspectives like Hong Kong citizens or the government and hackers. Because government and public citizens is affected, which means that they will be very aware of it and will prevent this not to happen again and the government and the company should solve the problem as fast as they can. From a hackers’ or data malware producers’ perspective, they are going to find ways to benefit themselves by others’ privacies.