Week 3 EOC: Internet Privacy vs Market Research

The internet and privacy are two completely different things and are, sometimes, impossible to have at the same time. When someone signs up for a new account anywhere, they have to give some kind of information about themselves. Whether it would be their address, their age or even their name, once its put on the internet anybody and everybody have a chance to see it.

“Market researchers, service departments and marketing departments often analyze comments made on the Internet to understand consumer attitudes and satisfaction with products and services. Researchers want to understand what people think; service departments want to follow up to improve satisfaction; marketing departments may want to make you aware of competing products. “

http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/28663/Consumer-Attitudes-towards-Social-Media-Market-Research-casrotech

You would think that law enforcement and/or the government would be following and monitoring more than anyone else but the result is not them.

“The United States Supreme Court has stated that American citizens have the protection of the Fourth Amendment (freedom from search and seizure absent warrant) when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.  Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, however, there is no privacy right to protect.  Files stored on disk or tapes in the home are protected, but the rule becomes less clear when applied to files stored on an Internet access provider's server.  Web servers, on the other hand, may be protected by federal law.  Some argue that consent of the access provider, however, is all that is required for law enforcement authorities to search and seize any files in the possession of that access provider. Internet service providers may have a lot of information about the users because servers routinely record information about users' e-mail and web browsing habits.”

http://www.netatty.com/privacy/privacy.html

So as a final thought, internet privacy is something that does not exist, if you are on the internet, there is no privacy!

“The lack of privacy is a government created problem – they are the ones doing the surveillance or mandating that ISP's log everything you do. They are the ones who are forming alliances with big businesses and who, through non-free-market privileges, monopolies, and a central bank money-lending system, create the atmosphere for unusually large mega corporations to exist.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/green-p/green-p10.1.html