User Created Content Privacy or Big Brother Is Watching You

In the last couple of years, the diversity of online cultures on the Internet is being enriched for a phenomenon called “user-created content”. Individuals are publicly sharing their thoughts, preferences, experiences, and feelings in the form of up-to-date online profiles and journals of their lives. Freedom of individual expression and the potential for unlimited participation in producing and publishing contents is leading to an immense user information flow and data-collection. Ingenious exposition of privacy and identity publicly enables user monitoring and surveillance. Monitoring performed by users, accompanied by user mutuality, empowering, and sharing, is considered to be useful, as it is fundamentally social, and can be part of subjectivity building. The opposite case however, when monitoring lacks the voluntary engagement of each participant, is much alike Orwellian Big Brother since privacy infringements can arise. The amount of available personal information makes “user-created content” services very useful to businesses for marketing purposes, to governments for law enforcement use, and to organizations or individuals involved in illegal activities and frauds. The possible privacy intrusions are not greatly recognized by users. While UCC users desire social connections and interaction, they are also naively and innocently inviting unknown individuals into relative intimacy.