An interesting take on Online Privacy

Rick Mercer has pretty much put into words the general Canadian opinion on invasion of privacy. The minister of Public Safety in Canada, Vic Toews has recently been criticized over bill C-30 and his comment "either stand with us or the child pornographers". Accusations have been made regarding the amount of power the police force has, or even the government over our internet activities. According to a recent Globe and Mail article, " ...[Bill-C30] require[s] Internet companies – loosely defined – to cough up your name, Internet protocol address and a few other identifiers if the police ask for them, even without a warrant".

Bill C-30 is called the "Investigating and Preventing criminal Electronic Communications Act". To understand the purpose of this act, I went to the Canadian Parliament's website and I found a summary, which you can find here.

One of the main purposes of this act is to give the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Commissioner of Competition and any police service constituted under the laws of a province (in essence anyone with police authority) to have access over whatever you do on an electronic device.

According to Vic, this bill will help keep Canadians, in particular children, more safe. It will be easier to catch child-pornographers and even other online criminals. However, there is always a trade-off when it comes to security. Are we really bring protected? It seems to me that while closing one possible door to danger, another on is being opened. This includes more cost for the Internet and telecommunication companies to maintain the data required, a risk of their systems getting hacked, information being misused by police-men and much more.

Canadians, or any other person for that matter, are very concerned about who can access their information. With Bill C-30, a lot of people are able to get information about any consumer that partakes in online activities some possibly without a warrant.

So all in all, personally I don't think bill C30 will solve more problems than it will create.

Social Networking Under Crisis

So there have been a lot of arguments around the advantages and disadvantages of social networking. Some people claim that social networking has been a bad influence on individuals: more time spent in front of computer screens and less time spent interacting with others than in person. Discussing this among a few friends, a topic of interest came up which was perfect for a blog entry.

We were talking about the influence of social networking in terms of spreading the news. I know that when it comes to news, I often find out whats happening through Facebook or twitter. Although the fact that I am not much of a news reader might come into play. But often cases have occurred when we all find out important information from come sort of social network.

As a general pattern, by personal observation humanity often spreads the "news" in ways that the communicate. First it was through word of mouth, then through books and writing, then newspapers, then media, and now social networks online.

I was curious however on how social networking impacts communication in emergency situations. I found a study titled "Twitter under crisis" (http://goo.gl/xLXHL), which also served as an inspiration for this blog's title. In this study, there was a detailed analysis of the spread of tweets and re-tweets during the Chile Earthquake in 2012. They also mark the impact of "false news" and its spread as well. In the end they conclude that news is effectively filtered and the difference between truth and false news claims. A chart in their research indicated the amount of tweets made that include the word earthquake. Within a few hours approximately 7000 re-tweets were made about the earthquake. That is a lot of people getting to know in a very short time.

Twitter has helped with not only the Chile disaster but many others as well. If we consider the amount of time for people to know about natural disasters or emergency situations before social networking. Any person involved, or watching the disaster happen will call, text or perhaps report it to a news company. Most of these require a person to contact another person in order to broadcast the news. Now all it requires is a single tweet to be reached to all of your followers, who can simply re-tweet it to theirs. A LOT of difference in time, and time matters when in an emergency.


So it turns out that social networking is not all that bad. Of course there are many other pros and cons, I just felt like this was something to point out. I used Twitter as an example here, but all other social networks also contribute to spreading the news. It might seem as if I am stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated in order to realize its importance!