Privacy Is Becoming an Important Issue Relating to the Use and Abuse of Information Technology

Since the Internet is getting more and more important to human, the term of Ў§privacyЎЁ is also getting frequent to discuss in the information technology sector. There is no reason to explain why the Internet and privacy are always related to each other. The Internet users only know that once they login to the Internet, their privacy can be stolen anytime. It sounds like very terrible, but it is possible.

On the Internet, there are many different discussions about privacy; therefore, privacy is getting hot for people to take about. No matter students, company executives or housewives, they both concern about their privacy. Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to stop information about themselves from becoming known to people other than those they choose to give the information to. So what actual matters make those groups concern about? Company executives feel very annoyed about unsolicited phone calls from strangers who selling new products. Students feel mad on receiving a thousand unsolicited e-mails every day. Housewives also go crazy to clean up more and more advertising letters from unknown companies in mail box every day. Unsolicited means not asked for and sometimes not wanted. People in those groups were also wondering how their information could be obtained by strangers.

Undoubtedly, privacies of those groups are stolen under those situations. There is a hundred unknown phone calls were always received by company executives, most of the calls are from advertisers and telemarketers. Company executives also went crazy even each phone call is only 2 minutes long. There are lots of minutes are disrupted if a company executive receives 100 unsolicited calls per day. Here is an example of unsolicited telemarketing calls received by a company executive. Once the company executive received an automatic call, he is usually asked to do something to get his "free" prize, like attending a sales presentation, buying something, or giveing out his credit card number. The prizes are often worthless or overpriced. At the end of the call, the company executive is given an option to press a number to be removed from the calling list, but no one knows the function does really work or not. Beside Ў§free prizeЎЁ, another example is about investment. In the past, victims lost millions of dollars each year on "getting rich quickly" schemes that Ў§promiseЎЁ high returns with riskless conditions. These products include movies, Internet gambling, rare coins, art and other "investment opportunities". These schemes are vary, but they both have a consistent which is unscrupulous promoters rely on the fact that investing can be complicated, and many investors did not research the investment process, finally, these investors became victims.

Identity theft and identity fraud are terms used to refer to all types of crime in which