With the spread of new media comes growing issues regarding privacy and confidentiality. We all remember the Myspace days where girls were being kidnapped and such because it's supremely easy for a middle-aged guy to Google image a 15 year old kid and make a fake profile to lure in little girls. Even before Myspace there were chat rooms where identities were frequently made up and you couldn't know who to trust.
As new media advances, so do these issues. If you post a Facebook status that you're out to dinner with the fam and your page is public, the whole world knows that your house is empty. People can find out where you work, your phone number, your address, email - basically nothing is sacred. You can't even apply for a job without worrying about those pictures of yourself doing a kegstand.
It's also an issue for those who own copyrighted material. My term paper was on music piracy, which is a perfect example of the fact that there is nothing you can't get for free on the internet. I don't even go to the movies anymore because I know that in a week I can find new movies somewhere online. It's a serious blow to the entertainment industry. I wanted to read Hubert Selby's "Requiem for a Dream" last week and it took about 5 minutes of Googling to find a PDF of the whole book. This week's reading regarding the Youtube/Warner Music Group issue relates to this subject. Amateur artists frequently gain popularity by posting "cover" versions of popular songs on their Youtube channels and they often run into the problem of their videos being taken down or the audio being taken off.
Then you've got Wikipedia, where people's biographies are being vandalized (see my post on poor Esperanza Spalding.) It seems that no matter what, as long as new media advances, the issues of privacy and confidentiality on the internet will advance right along with it.
Due to privacy issues of the internet, I think it is best for little kid not to use internet on such a young age. Because of the fact that children are expose to internet at a very young age, it leads to the happening of many criminal behaviors as children are not mature enough to know what to be share and not share over the internet.
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