Privacy and Confidentiality

As I spoke about in one of my previous posts, individuals in our modern day society have become obsessed with social media to the point that if they leave their house and forget their phone, an anxiety comes and they feel as if they are being left out and forgotten. With the new smartphones and social media sites, there are many points and times where the devices and applications ask for your personal information and it has been found that they are selling their personal data such as your email address, address book, and many other things which you at one point might have authorized without permission. In a recent article posted in the Atlantic, it was found that Facebook "access basic information and it now includes...passing your current address and mobile phone number to whichever application is trying to gain access from it." Scammers, he states, are impersonating real applications and are taking your information from Facebook and selling it to advertisers, spammers, and scammers. The only advice he offers is to simply disconnect yourself entirely from the site.

This unfortunately is just one aspect to a very controversial subject. For instance, recently it was found that AT&T employees were infringing on their costumers rights and were stealing their personal information including their social security numbers, addresses, and other personal data which should remain confidential and should not be even able to be accessed by any employee.
Although AT&T's hacking was indeed horrible, they are not the only one. Notable hackings of other networks include, Apple's iCloud, Sony's Network, Target and the stealing of credit cards and many many others.

By allowing such information to be so accessible are we thusly allowing ourselves to be so naive to think that there aren't a few bad apples who will hack the content and use it against us? The problem is that we'd like to think that companies and corporations are trustworthy enough not to expose our confidential information but unfortunately thats not the world we live in.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/07/att-data-breach_n_5943138.html