Final DCS blog post- Privacy

In an earlier post I mentioned the issue of privacy online and how we are happily giving away every detail about ourselves online, which isn’t always a good thing.  As this is my final reflective blog post for my Digital Communications Strategies unit and I can talk in more detail about any of the subjects which I have looked at so far, I have decided to look into the issue of privacy in more detail as it was the subject that I found the most interesting and a little worrying!

The subject of “cookies” is interesting when it comes to privacy online. “Every site you visit can place a "cookie" on your hard drive which will record a few crumbs of information about you”  ( Valentine, 2009) These cookies make it easy for websites and brands to advertise their products on various different websites that they know their consumers use . They keep track of what you’ve bought and how much you’ve spent and will use this information when trying to encourage you to buy more products that are similar. This is all well and good advertising to you things that the companies and websites think are of interest to you but they haven’t actually asked your permission to store information about you.

A study by Privacy International (2007) looked at a number of different companies such as Microsoft and Google to see how effective their privacy practices were. There were twenty parameters which were employed in the analysis. Some of the categories for analysis were; data collection and processing, openness and transparency, data retention and ethical compass. However “it was not always possible to precisely assess a company’s approach in each category” ( Privacy International, 2007) Each category was assessed on a colour band system:

Privacy-friendly and privacy enhancing

Generally privacy-aware but in need of improvement

Generally aware of privacy rights, but demonstrate some notable lapses

Serious lapses in privacy practices

Substantial and comprehensive privacy threats

Comprehensive consumer surveillance & entrenched hostility to privacy

( Privacy International, 2007)

Each company was given a rating in each category and then it was averaged out to get a final score.

Google was scored as being the most “hostile “ to privacy, which Privacy International has noted as being maybe seen as controversial. One of the reasons for Google’s low ranking is “its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies” ( Privacy International, 2007)

Google were involved in a big scandal in several countries last year after it admitted that “it’s street view mapping cars had inadvertently collected browsing information over wireless networks, although it says it is highly unlikely that any of the data would be useful” ( Beaumont, 2010)  

The article also talks about people’s concerns over their Facebook accounts, as the site was thought to be “tinkering with privacy settings, which has made more personal information publicly visible by default” ( Beaumont, 2010) However there are a number of controls which you can change in your individual account settings , but they are automatically set to everything being public unless you physically change it yourself.  

Another scandal surrounding Facebook and privacy issues was in July 2009, “An online security consultant who wished to highlight the social networking site's privacy issues published a list of data taken from more than 100million users' profiles” (Quigley, 2010)

The file was downloaded by a lot of people but Facebook claimed that the information was “already freely available” (Quigley, 2010) They also said that people” own their own information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want and when they want” ( Quigley, 2010)This claim says that it is up to the users of Facebook as to who sees their private information but this isn’t the case. This could be seen as Facebook trying to shift the blame for the information being readily available to the public, which isn’t good PR for the brand.  This shows that with the popularity of Facebook increasing and the things you can do on Facebook increasing, they may have allowed the website to become more lax on security . “Facebook’s frequent modifications, designed to maximize both the level of interaction (and engagement) and thus the amount of data that can be captured and used” ( Andrejevic, 2011). As a Facebook user myself I regularly go into my privacy settings to check they are all correct and that I’m not sharing any personal information with anyone who I am not friends with. However, there are plenty Facebook users who don’t check their settings and then wonder why they can be contacted by people they aren’t friends with or by advertisers. According to an ABC News article “ Facebook acknowledged a problem with its site that reveals your name and names of your Facebook friends to some advertisers, and potentially tracks the websites you visit online” ( Worley, 2010) This relates back to what Valentine said about how cookies work, storing information from websites that people visit.  This video relates to how information is being shared through social networking.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/facebook-privacy-scandal-facebooks-watergate/story?id=11912201 ( on the previous post)

The issue of privacy will always be around where online advertising and especially social networks are concerned. There will continue to be scandals and news stories claiming that people’s data isn’t safe online and personal details have been leaked. The privacy policies that are in place aren’t always clear to users on what is and isn’t being shared with the public and third parties, to minimise worries in the future about privacy online, the policies could maybe be made clearer and easier for people to understand. In my opinion there are more and more reasons to worry about privacy online, with the increasing amount of time people are spending online; shopping, studying, social networking they are at more risk of their private details being shared. The amount of times we enter our card details online without thinking twice is worrying, we don’t know who those details are going to be shared with. But with this in mind, will we actually think about this next time we buy a CD from Play.com?  No, in all honesty we probably won’t!

Word count : 1,028

References:

Andrejevic, Mark. 2011. Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy. Surveillance & Society 8(3):278-287. Available from: http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/article/view/alienation/alienation [ Accessed 24th April 2011]

Beaumount, C., 2010 Is it really possible to have online privacy in the internet age?  Telegraph.co.uk . Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7741526/Is-it-really-possible-to-have-online-privacy-in-the-internet-age.html [Accessed 24th April 2011]

Privacy International., 2007 A race to the bottom: Privacy ranking of internet service companies Available from: https://www.privacyinternational.org/article/race-bottom-privacy-ranking-internet-service-companies [Accessed 24th April 2011]

Quigley, D., 2010 Facebook privacy fears for 100m users as their personal details are published on file sharing site Mail Online Available from: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/29/article-1298600-0A9CBB5F000005DC-256_468x353.jpg [ Accessed 24th April 2011]

Valentine, M., 2009 Big Brother is watching you! Privacy issue online Website 101 Available from: http://website101.com/small-business/big-brother-watching-privacy-issues-online/ [Accessed 24^th April 2011]

Worley, B., 2010 Facebook: Another privacy scandal ABC News Available from:  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/facebook-privacy-scandal-facebooks-watergate/story?id=11912201 [Accessed 24^th April 2011]

Facebook Apps Disclose User Info

DCS- Online Ethics

Ethics and Regulation are “hot” words in the advertising industry, they refer to regulating content and the way they talk to people.  As of march 1^st 2011 The Uk code of non-broadcast advertising expanded to include online, relating to misleading advertising, the protection of children and social responsibility. The CAP code can be found at http://www.cap.org.uk/The-Codes/CAP-Code.aspx.

Ethics are important to any company as they need to rely on consumers having trust in their brand so that the can therefore be loyal.  If a brand has any negative publicity regarding ethics or social responsibility then they are likely to see it affect their brands status and customer following.  They will also be very unlikely to attract any new customers. Now that online advertising has become increasingly popular, companies also have to worry about everything they do in their online adverts but also on their Facebook and Twitter pages.

Social media can be a good way to gain brand awareness for charities, there are many ways in which they can do this, by having a page where people can donate to a cause, having an intereactive application where you do something which will raise or donate money or just by having a pag to make people aware of what the cause does.

The website , http://www.squidoo.com/top10facebookcharityapps has compiled a list of the top 10 charity applications on Facebook and each one has different ways which people can get involved with donating or raising money for the cause.

I personally think that social media can be a good way to advertise your brand but you need to make sure you are ethical and show you know your consumers and can relate to them.  However, I don’t think that brands that use a “world disaster” to gain publicity for their brand are very ethical with using online media, for example with the search engine Bing, asking people to retweet a message with their name in, saying they will donate money to the Japan Tsunami appeal everytime someone does, on Twitter.

References:

http://www.cap.org.uk/The-Codes/CAP-Code.aspx.

 http://www.squidoo.com/top10facebookcharityapps

DCS- Digital Activism

“Activism the doctrine or practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other goals, sometimes by demonstrations or protests etc. “ (Dictionary.com)  There are many ways to show activism, but as the digital world has continued to grow, it is more commonly used online. . The meta activism project builds a toolkit that allows online potential activists to become politically and socially active. Mary Joyce ( Mcmanus, 2010) said that the “practice of using digital technology for political and social change” Facebook and Twitter amongst other social media platforms can be used as a means of protesting and using digital activism. A good example of how Facebook has been used as a way of trying to actively change a social norm was in 2009 when there was a Facebook campaign launched to get “Rage against the machine” to number 1 instead of the X Factor winner. The group claimed that they were fed up of the predictability of the music charts and the success of “The X Factor”. According to the creators of the campaign Jon and Tracey Morter the campaign started out as a “ silly idea that makes you laugh in your own home” ( BBC News, 2009) These platforms are often very cost-effective and bale to reach many people at the same time. 

Digital activism follows a hype cycle :

The hype cycle has 5 stages,  the technology triggers a buzz, there is a peak of inflated expectations, a trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment and a plateau of productivity.

In regards to Twitter a recent article on the BBC News page discussing Oprah winfrey’s first tweet on air during her programme, which led to a 43% increase in traffic to the Twitter website  because eof the Oprah effect. However, Twitter has only just peaked in popularity but one of the co-founders Mr Stone said that “ if the early response to the service had not been so positive, it would probably not have survived” ( Shiels, 2009)

Is digital activism a new way to express feelings for change and actually get a result at the end of it? Or is it just a way of causing nuisance? Let me know what you think.

References:

Dictionary.com, definition of Activism. Available from: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/activism [ Accessed 20th march 2011]

Macmanus, R., 2010. Digital Activism: an interview with Mary Joyce Avaiable from: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digital_activism_an_interview_with_mary_joyce.php [Accessed 20th march 2011]

Shiels, M., 2009 Can Twitter survive the hype cycle? BBC News  Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8015777.stm [Accessed 20th march 2011]

DCS- Is there such thing as absolutely private?

Privacy if often described as the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one’s private life or affairs. With today’s growing technology is it possible that anything is truly private?

Take Facebook for example , there are so many different elements which come under “privacy settings”, you have to go every single thing separately , wall posts, photos etc and check if you want friends to be able to see them, friends of friends as well or everyone.  Although up until recently they had sort of generic privacy settings which just had everything under one heading and you chose who could see it. However, when it was switched to the new privacy settings it didn’t alert you and you didn’t realise that it had changed the settings. I only found out because someone said something to me about it and I looked and had to change all my settings because it was automatically set so that everybody could see everything on my page.

It’s a bit worrying to think how easily someone could gain access to details of your life through something like Facebook. I personally used to put a lot of things on Facebook without even thinking about it, but after hearing some horror stories on the news I now think twice about it. You hear stories about people saying that they’re going on holiday on Facebook and then coming hoem to find it that they have been burgled because it was evident on Facebook that no-one was going to be there.

 Big news articles in recent years concerning privacy online have been things like the Wikileaks, "The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies" (Leigh, 2010) and in 2007 there was the “lost” disk of 25million UK Child benefit recipients personal details.( BBC, 2007) These stories show the casual nature in which sensitive information is dealt with.

Yet after these horror stories we still willingly put things on Facebook and enter our bank details online to various websites.

So with the complex and fast moving area is it always going to be possible to know if something is actually going to be kept private if it says it is? Well I think in the short term the answer is no.

References:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/privacy
Leigh, D., 2010 US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis Guardian.co.uk Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable-leak-diplomacy-crisis [Accessed 13th march 2011]
BBC News., 2007 UK families put on fraud alert. BBC News.co.uk Available from : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7103566.stm [Accessed 13th march 2011]

DCS- Product placement- good or bad?

As of the 28^th February this year, product placement will now be allowed in the UK. This means that brand can pay to have their products featured on a television or radio programme. Obviously, as with every from of advertising there are a set of rules which coincide with this, which can be found at http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/commercial-references-television/. So the question here is , is this a good thing or a bad thing that it has been allowed in the UK? And will it lead to certain brands dominating the market?

Well the first piece of product placement was on “This Morning” and it was by Nescafe, it signed a £100,000 deal to feature its Dolce Gusto coffee machine for 3 months in the kitchen area. Now having watched the clip I don’t think it’s actually too obvious that it has been placed there on purpose. Being honest, I didn’t know it was by Nescafe either it just looked like a normal coffee machine that could have been bought from Asda. Now if all product placement is going to be this subtle is it really going to be a problem? Well I don’t think so because if you think about it,  in everything we watch films, soaps and even documentaries there are products being used , so what’s the difference if a brand has paid to have that product there?  No I don’t think there is going to be much difference.

However if we think about the fact that certain brand may try to dominate the market through the use of product placement then it’s a different story.  For a strong brand such as Cadburys then product placement can simply reinforce brand awareness and subtly target their audience in ways they feel necessary. However, a less well-known brand may struggle with using product placement successfully because they may not be able to afford to compete with stronger brands to reach their target audience.

I think that product placement has good points and potential bad points, but I think it is definitely something to monitor and watch over the first few months of use, to see if it can achieve anything for specific brands. 

References:

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/commercial-references-television/.

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/disciplines/advertising/nescaf%C3%A9s-dolce-gusto-first-product-placement-advertiser/3023909.article 

DCS- Seamless Branding

Seamless branding is all about enhancing the consumer experience, digital can be one way in which this is possible. There are many ways it can be done digitally, through social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, through mobile phone apps or even microsites. These are all ways in which the consumer can actually interact with the brand. I for instance, “Like” the brand Cornetto UK on Facebook and this is now a way for me to interact with this brand. I can see information about its latest products and any updates appear on my homepage. 

Most brands now have a facebook page which they regularly update to inform consumers about their products or services. I think this is definitely a way forward, because of the high proportion of people using social media sites like Facebook, if they can access information about brands they like without having to go on to their websites they are more likely to take notice of the brands profile because they are not having to leave Facebook. An advantage is also that if , like me , people see they someone has “liked” a brands page on their homepage, they will think “Oh, I like that brand” and press like straight away without thinking twice about it and there we go, they now receive updates from that brands page constantly.

Another digital way of enhancing the consumer experience of your brand is through things such as mobile phone applications. A good example of this is the “Wetherspoons” app, in which if downloaded can direct you to the nearest “Wetherspoons” pub. This allows consumers to be able to access the brand very easily. They are being informed of how to get to the pub and whereabouts the nearest one to them is. Many companies now have “apps” which are available for their consumers to use, Tesco have the grocery scanning app, Aviva has an accident claiming app and even Topshop has an app which is updated 5 times a week and claims to have over 300 new styles added.

As someone who uses apps, I think that this is a good way to enhance consumer experiences. With an app like the “Wetherspoons” I would definitely use this and find it useful because I have been in the situation before, when your visiting a place you’ve never been before and looking for somewhere to eat and you don’t know where anything is and you think oh a spoons will do but you don’t have a clue where one is. An app which is going to take you directly to the desired brand will be a hit because people are lazy and don’t want to have to figure out things for themselves, or if there anything like me they don’t want to stop and ask someone directions!

I think that digital can be very effective in enhancing consumers’ experiences and it does relate to seamless branding, because it can easily give people information about a brand without directly advertising to them and a lot of the time people are choosing to interact with the brand and are actively searching for the information.

References:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/topshop/id355683626?mt=8