Privacy of The Undiscovered
In my internet communications class we had a guest speaker, Dr. Paul Gates, come in to talk to us about privacy on the internet. In fact, one of the very first statements Gates enlightened us with was that, "we don't have privacy anymore. It's been given away." If you think about it, he's absolutely correct. There are so many ways of how people's information can be exposed online. As a matter of fact, Dr. Gates mentioned that anyone can look up someone's criminal as well as arrest records by simply going to Google and typing it in the search bar. In the book, Superconnected, written by Mary Chayko, mentions the dangers that come from having personal information about yourself on the internet. Anyone that is skilled enough to hack into people's computers or to create a cyberattack can access any information that they want. The release of personal information can be used to harm, embarrass, or as a fear tactic. For an example, the release of the movie, The Interview, was leaked through the internet. This was damaging even though it didn't seem like it. If you think about it, all the money that was put into the movie for production was all wasted when it was leaked. The producers and everyone that worked on the movie would get some money back from what's made in the theatre, but they had to skip that overall since it was leaked.
For The Undiscovered's represented artists, online privacy is an issue at times. Anyone can go to our website and save or download any of the work that's on the page without our knowledge. In reality, all the work on our website is made solely by our amazingly talented artists. With that being stated, it's considered stealing when people take advantage and download our artists' work. It's not fair for an artist to put an abundance of time and effort into a piece, then upload it for people to view and give feedback, then later see their own work being showed as someone else's. As many of my art teachers have said in the past, "everything has been done in art." So when someone takes the chance to step outside the box and make something different, it's not ethical for someone to steal it and call it their own, when they didn't contribute a single part to the piece.
