Blog Assignment 5

The first idea to deter piracy that comes to mind is most definitely subscription-based content.  If you look at services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify, you'll find that they have tons of active users.  This is because they pay a monthly price (typically less than $10), and receive large amounts of content.  The way that content producers (bands, TV shows) get money is a monthly payout from the services similar to Hulu or Spotify.  The "middlemen" can also supply the content creators with more accurate statistics about viewers as opposed to TV stations.

Another idea is having a set standard of piracy laws.  A third-party international body could be formed to combat the issue.  They could potentially lay out laws and regulations that countries can choose to adopt if they wanted to fight against piracy.  This one is a shot in the dark though, because it would require massive funding from somewhere.  An example of how this has been difficult in the past is with "The Pirate Bay", which is a popular website to find illegally copied content.  They left when prosecuted from their original country, and kept bouncing around to host their website in different countries as they started being discovered.  An international body could make catching these types of offenders easier.

My third option is changing the file types of commercial media.  Look at modern video games. It's nearly impossible to find copied PS4 or Xbox One games.  This is because the arrangement of file types on the disk (and file types themselves) are extremely complex.  It takes proprietary hardware (the video game console) to be able to read the data on the disk.  If we moved away from the standard mp3 and mp4 file types to something more complex, piracy would decrease because of the learning curve to decode/encode a new file type.

Blog Assignment 4

It’s no secret that users like personalized content.  They like it whenever they visit a site, it’s different in a small way every time.  Good examples of this are amazon.com, who has personalized findings for suggested products on the home page every time you visit, and also news websites.  Often you can subscribe to certain types of news (tech, world, health, etc) that that content will appear on your home page.  The difficult and touch part of being able to create personalized content is the fact that you need to collect consumer information before you can do so.  An example provided in the article is about personalized digital tutoring, and how the student may not want the programmers knowing what skills they lack.  

There three classifiable groups on the privacy debate.  There are the privacy fundamentalists, who oppose all disclosing of information online, or in other physical settings.  The opposite side is the privacy unconcerned, who only express mild concern about their information.  Privacy pragmatists are what we’d consider “moderate” if we were to equate this situation to a political spectrum.  They have concern over their information, but are typically more understanding (and possibly more educated) about where their information is going, and why it’s being collected.

Attitudes about collected information can obviously change though, depending on the type being collected.  People are usually okay with disclosing basic demographics and lifestyle information such as hobbies.  Generally, less people disclose details about their “internet behavior and purchases”.  Financial details (credit card info, etc) is among the least disclosed types of information along with social security details.

The best things you can do to collect private information that will benefit your site include: having a privacy statement, having a clean and dignified looking website, as well as having a clean reputation.  A privacy statement (or policy) basically states what you do with consumer information, and how it would benefit their experience.  Having a clean website, and clean reputation simply let the user (either subconsciously or consciously) feel more comfortable while using your website.

The question I propose about privacy is this:

Where do we draw the line? In an ever increasing digital age, how can we find out where the balance is between the amount of user information we collect and benefits to user experience?