Three things to help stop piracy!

For so long people have taken the easy way out and downloaded movies, music, and digital content for free. There are three ways I think that the media and government can help reduce this easy act.

1. The first way would be to create more viruses on the popular downloading websites. I know personally I avoid the downloading websites solely to avoid viruses. If these downloading websites people use completely shut down your computer when you tried to download music or movies people would start to stop. Trying to contain viruses and clean out your computer is a difficult process and people would want to avoid that. Basically the viruses will cause a set back for users.

2.  The next step would be to actually punish people who are doing the free downloading. I know there were efforts before to try to stop piracy but those efforts weren't enough. If the government would take hasher actions on piracy by enforcing the laws and executing punishments, people would download less.

3. Lastly if companies like iTunes and Spotify would lower their prices just a little more, things like that would be more affordable. If they stripped the option to illegally download music and movies and lowered the prices of companies who stream music and movies people would have no choice but to purchase them. If the government completely took away the options to illegally download then there would be no other option but to purchase music and movies legally. Spotify and iTunes already offer free options for users already. The government should take away the convenience of illegal downloading and create a demand for purchasing this digital content.

Privacy-enhanced Personalization

In the article, Privacy-enhanced Personalization, it is discussing the relationship between personalization and privacy. Through research the studies have shown that some consumers value personalized content and on the other hand those consumers are worried about exposing too much of their personal content.  Therefore it brings in the issue of privacy and how personalized systems can invade the privacy of others. This article offers up ways to design the personalized systems to avoid invading someone’s privacy.

The Privacy Calculus:

They have tried to make different calculations for privacy. They came up with factors that play a role in the Privacy Calculus. The factors are: personality and culture based privacy attitudes, the type of information to be disclosed and its deviance from the average, the recipient, the value being assigned to personalization benefits, the extent to which users know what information has been disclosed and can control its usage, and various trust establishing factors. These factors are further explained throughout the article.

Individual Privacy Attitudes:

There are three types of attitudes: Privacy fundamentalist who have extreme concern about their privacy, Privacy Unconcerned who have mild concern about their privacy, and Privacy Pragmatists who have a general concern about their privacy.

An important point to make is as long as developers show their users clearly the benefits of their services it will provide more value in those personalized systems.

Most users just want control over the usage of their personal information.

Design and operation of a Web site:

Key factors to a trusted website are: the absence of errors, professional design and usability, the presence of contact information, links from a believable Web site, links to outside sources and materials, updates, and quick responses. Trust is a huge motivational factor for someone to disclose personal information.

There are several techniques in the research process that can help with privacy protections. The four techniques to help with collaborative-filtering are Distribution, Aggregation of encrypted data, Perturbation, and Obfuscation.

The question I pose is: At some point in the future will the idea of privacy be stripped away from us?