Privacy

Issues of privacy and confidentiality are heavily related to new media. As new media increasingly becomes popular among all generations, many are creating social media accounts that make it quite impossible to stay private about our lives and even our identities. Social media sites have a user agreement before one goes forth and uses their account. This basically gives the platform the right to sell our data that the site is collecting to sell to advertisements. It's quite shocking how sometimes when you speak about, let's say lipsticks with a friend through text, a sponsored ad on Instagram from M.A.C pops up on your IG feed. This has increasingly become popular, in multiple forms, even on browsers as many companies are using this to their advantage to reach targeted audiences. Even social media sites like TikTok are gathering information on a user's activities online by collecting cookies to generate a FYP (For You Page) specifically for the user. This has been quite shocking for me because as a new TikTok user, I see all these relevant videos on my page that I would be interested in and even content on some topics I text about with my friends. As a result, privacy and confidentiality is basically non-existent when you're using new media. While there have been many concerns and opinions voiced about this issue, this will only seem to get worse as more and more users turn to new media.