It seems that today's society is torn between two very different view points when it comes to the issue of privacy on the Internet. There are a lot of theories and ideas out there about how we got to be so divided on this subject, however I believe it comes down to a simple fact of difference in generations.
Before the emergence of large social media web sites such as AOL, Facebook, and Twitter, the Internet was mainly used for things such as information sharing, business development and marketing, and (let's face it) porn. I can remember back in high school when we first started using the web our resources were very limited, and we certainly weren't using it for any kind of communication with our friends or family. It's was something more like an encyclopedia or some other source of information. Once the ability to email came about it caught on like wildfire, and so began the great war against spam, viruses, and anything else that hindered our experience on the web.
Scholars, lawyers and privacy advocates are also scrambling to sort through the implications of the rules, which set up a pitched battle between the right to privacy and freedom of expression online. The wide gap between these situations - and about a million imaginable scenarios in between - begins to map out the legal minefield the European Commission is charging through. Late last month, the executive body for the European Union proposed a strict set of privacy rules that included a "right to be forgotten." The regulations must be approved by member states, but the language sent a jolt through companies such as Google and Facebook, which have built business models dependent on user data and could face multimillion-dollar fines for infractions.
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