Privacy Issues Caused by New Technology
Blogs and new internet technology have caused increasing privacy problems in today’s
society. Inappropriate blog use has been occurring. According to FORTUNE Magazine, over
three dozen of the FORTUNE 500 companies now produce blogs,
for better or worse. At first, only technology companies led the
way into business blogging, but now several other corporations
have jumped on the bandwagon. In addition, corporations are
creating fake facebook profiles, known as meat puppets. Sock
puppets, or false online personas, also exist. Ruckus Network Inc. used a meat puppet “Brody
Ruckus” to obtain the email addresses of 300,000 facebook users. As another example, in the
article “Corporate blogging: Wal-Mart’s fumbles”, a discussion of Wal-Mart’s faulty blog use
occurs. Recently, a blog praising Wal-Mart, “ostensibly created by a man and a woman traveling
the country in an RV and staying in Wal-Mart parking lots, turned out to be underwritten by
Working Families for Wal-Mart, a company-sponsored group organized by the Edelman public
relations firm.”
Fake Blog Scandals are
becoming more and more popular.
An article, “Sony Confesses to
Creating ‘Flog,’ Shutters
Comments” discusses a recent
fake blog scandal. Author, Shankar
Gupta writes, “This one- the latest in a string of stealth marketing efforts- involves a “flog,” or
fake blog, created by viral marketing firm Zipatoni to promote the Sony PSP.” Using a blog as a
marketing tool may be seen as unethical from some perspectives. Another ethical dilemma is
invasion of privacy. AOL released search log data on subscribers that had been intended for use
with the company’s newly launched research site. According to the article, “AOL apologizes for
release of user search data” by Elinor Mills and Dawn Kawamoto, 658,000 subscribers could
readily be indentified based on the searches each individual conducted.
Recent advances in technology have created a surplus of blogs, flogs, meat-puppets, and
other ways corporations can cheat and attract more consumers. It is a big problem in today’s
society that corporations advertising false or misleading information.