This week’s readings were about trust and the Internet, which is hilarious because I am pouring out my inner thoughts about what the authors said about the topic on the “Internet trust.” Article 1 is Surveillance & Society: Debate | Networked Privacy by Danah Boyd; Article 2 is Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena by Paul Dourish and Ken Anderson; Article 3 is Online Trust, Trustworthiness, or Assurance? by Coye Cheshire.
Boyd’s article is very short and grapples with our networks and how they are multiple layers; all connected, made up of data. But within this data, which is in the network, we have the control to keep our data save. But do we? Boyd also brings up how people incoherently give out information on the internet that effects their family or even future family members. Such as giving your DNA to the DNA companies to find out your ancestry. Your DNA is forever in their database and traceable and networked.
Article 2, Dourish and Anderson, are trying to have their readers look at privacy and security in a well-rounded or all-inclusive view. They look at the two concepts separately, stating, “privacy, then, is generally approached as a social consideration, whereas security is seen as a technical concern. The relation between them is that security technologies might provide mechanisms by which privacy can be ensured” (Dourish and Anderson, 322).
Article 3 deals with trust within human to human interaction and human to system interaction; and how trustworthiness is built over time. Cheshire grapples with the idea that humans trust interactions with each other over relationships built over time. But the risk is different when we are on the Internet because we use it for a vast amount of different things, such as business and fun. So when the system fails, we feel betrayed by it (computer), even though it is a computer and they really do not know they are doing it because they are an object (Cheshire,55-56). But then who are we supposed to blame? The person who programmed it? Or the person at the other end of the interaction of the Internet? Or something or someone else?
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