Centro Escolar Solalto

Information Technology in a Global Society

Analysing ITGS Situations

Instructions: Use the following template to analyze news articles for your ITGS class.

News article title: Data Privacy Day, Twitter and Google focus on government requests

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/28/tech/social-media/data-privacy-day/index.html

Brief description of situation: Twitter and Google release reports about users ask for personal information, most of them are from goverments.

Key stakeholders: Online users, government, Twitter and Google.

IT system involved: Twitter, Google and Other Social Networks

Related issues of social and ethical significance:

1.1 Reliability and integrity, 1.2 Security, 1.3 Privacy and anonymity, 1.4 Intellectual property, 1.5 Authenticity, 1.6 The digital divide and equality of access, 1.7 Surveillance,

This article is related to reliability and integrity because this social networks are showing that users can rely on them to safe keep their personal information, except with governments. Also security and privacy and anonymity are affected because if the social networks involved share their personal information, their privacy and security may be at stake. Finally policies are also involve in this IT system because every social network have certain policies about privacy that they have to respect.

Areas of social impact:

Economic, political, cultural, legal, environmental, ergonomic, health, psychological and morally.

It has an impact on politics and governments because government are the ones that are directly asking for personal information.

Evaluating the impacts:

Are the impacts serious? Are they long or short term? Are all the stakeholders affected of just a few? Are the stakeholders a large or small group? Are the impacts local or global? Are the impacts likely to lead to future problems?

The impacts are very serious because the privacy of the users and also the needs of the government are at stake. All the parties involved may be affected because if the information is given to governments, the social networks infringe with the privacy policy, while wif they don’t give the information, the government may have a lot of problems in finding certain people they are interested in, such as terrorists.

Conclusion: The consequences of this is the loss of privacy of the social network users to the government