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Chapter one: Introduction
1.1
Preamble
The Internet has developed from being a secure military communication channel to
becoming a public space commonly used for communication purposes (Tarnoff, 2018).
Social media platforms on the Internet have almost become an integral part of people’s lives
(Gordhamer, 2018). They have enabled them to stay in touch with their loved ones, get to
form relationships with total strangers, keep tabs on the lives of others through the posts that
they share, get information, and inform others, among other things. These platforms have
brought about a unification of the world where users from almost all countries, save for the
likes of North Korea, are able to get in touch with people from far away countries (Talmadge,
2018). However, social media platforms have created a new problem altogether. There has
been a huge increase in the amount of personal information that users have been putting out
to the public domain. This information was initially just being stored on the servers of the
social media platforms till they started monetizing it. Platforms such as Facebook, which
initially never wanted anything to do with ads, came to be at the forefront of trading users'
data for money. Many people and organizations have come to question the legality of these
actions, as they are presumed to violate the privacy rights of users. There have also been
ethical questions about the sale of personal data to advertisers by these social media
companies. The boundary between what is regarded as private and what is not has only been
reducing. Apart from the violations of privacy by social media companies, there have been
concerns over the amount of sensitive data that oblivious users have been sharing on these
platforms.
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