Somebody's Watching You : Social media and surveillance : MM52

• This article is expressing the extent to which our lives online are constantly under surveillance. The main concepts are Facebook surveillance, privacy settings, data mining and mobile monitoring. This highlights that despite its unethical grounds its a small price to pay to access social media. 
• There have been many incidences of this breach in privacy such as it Philadelphia school issued cameras were used to monitor students behavior. Daniel Trottier compares the digital space of social media and compares it to the different contexts in which we live our lives where it all bridges on social media. These have been kept separate and private before hand but no everyone can see. 
• Psychologist Erving Goffman suggested that we are like actors, preforming different behavior to create different impressions. 
• Targeted adverts (data mining) is described as ‘deep, intensive and persistent surveillance’ (Naughton, 2014) which often allows for example to infer a Facebook users IQ, Sexuality. political views, personality etc. by what they have liked on Facebook (Halliday, 2013) There has also been research showing that individuals moods can be influenced by what the see on Facebook feeds. 
• Nick Lancey issued the warning that the government also wants access to this information. despite the fact that we agree to third parties accessing our information in return for services we aren't agreeing for the government to view this information too.  ***contains quotes from article

After reading this article i believe that in some cases these breaches in privacy can be deemed as acceptable and in others not so much. Third parties viewing our data and providing us we personalized services through data mining seems like a positive to me, after all it is creating a better online experience for us. However, this data should be used to enhance and better the experience rather than trying to manipulate us into buying certain products e.g. those very annoying pop up adds. However, monitoring behavior visually through web cams etc. is a no no. 

In terms of the government accessing this data i'm not quiet sure, yes in terms of helping to counteract terrorism and criminal breaches online i don't see any harm in doing so, however mass monitoring shouldn't be allowed especially amongst innocent people, they haven't done anything wrong that should allow their security to be breached. The government should only be allowed to breach this platform of privacy if they are at least 95% sure they can press severe criminal charges on the individual otherwise no. My main reasoning for this is because it would provide the government too much data which could allow the current government to change and manipulate certain laws and policies because of the data they see allowing them to get more votes etc. in the campaigns to come - it will just make it easier to lie to the audience and manipulate their thoughts and beliefs as they would gain a better insight into how to do so, as well as it being democratically wrong, there would hardly be any differences in the lies political personalities tell us across parities. I understand its a far fetched idea but so is teacher's stalking students via webcams.