Term Of Service Jacob Silverman Analysis

“Vulnerable Information” Privacy has become a prominent topic in academic and social debate throughout the country. In “Term of Service” by Jacob Silverman, Silverman argues that American citizens today are unaware that their private information is often shown and are no longer safe from the public eye. After all, the integration of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter has made it impossible to keep anything private. Sharing life events on social media has become the new social norm in the United States. However, this new trend has left the online community with a false sense of security, leaving them venerable against data mining, profiling, and unknown surveillance issues by third party miners across the country.

Industry or domains such as governments, military, corporations, financial institutions, and hospitals collect, process and store a great deal of confidential information on computers and transmits that data across networks to other computers or servers. This method of information collecting is called data mining. “Data mining, also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), is the process of searching through databases to discover patterns or relationships within large datasets” (Al-Saggaf). This method allows industries to understand their consumers, residents, or targets without ever meeting them in person. “To understand the depth of our privacy problems, we must look at the ideological, economic, and cultural roles that data collection and data mining have assumed in recent years” (Silverman 313). For example, best buy a top retail company could gather information about the population in a certain city like Joliet, based on cultural background and create advertisements that could better attract new customers to their stores. This gives them an upper hand over their competitors and strengths a financial hold on the local market. Since, data can be attained publicly without consequences, miners (typically third-party agents) could operate in the dark gathering and selling information from social media to their corporate

However, securing private information on social media is not one of them. “The reason that privacy laws in Europe and the U.S. are so different springs from a basic divergence in attitude: Europeans reserve their deepest distrust for corporations, while Americans are far more concerned about their government invading their privacy(Sullivan). Knowing this we in the social media community can easily see why industrial data mining goes unchallenged in the States. The U.S government is more worried about internal terrorist threats by their own citizens than corporate espionage. Leading to millions of dollars being earned by corporate data mining. On the other hand, the European Union “At the state level see, the right to privacy and data protection is explicitly recognized in the constitutions of many EU member states, notably those enacted in Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War” (Fabbrini). Making it a principle human right for all people within their borders and not just for the elite. Now what can the U.S government do to solve this alarming