Month: August 2019

Research paper

On August 19, 2019

In Distributed & Open Learning, EdTechUVic, Research paper-draft

How surveillance capitalism significant to data and privacy

In the era of the rapid development of technology and network, they bring us more convenient and advanced life. The number of channels for people to gain information has been increasing, as well as, the timeliness and effectiveness of information are growing stronger and greater. However, while using the network to facilitate our life, people should also pay attention to network security issues, i.e. personal information leak, fraud, internet addiction and so on. Today, unauthorized disclosure of personal information is one of the major problems that people should be aware of.

In our daily life, we all know that we have to protect our own privacy and would not easily give out our personal info to other people. However, take a deeper thought, we seem to be “naked” in this era of informational development. We expose our personal information inadvertently, from online shopping to registering an account; from filling out a questionnaire to participating in a lucky draw. In the past decade, a term of Surveillance Capitalism has appeared in the visual field of public. The professor of Harvard University, Shoshanna Zuboff in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” coined a term “Surveillance Capitalism” which is “the monetization of data captured through monitoring people’s movements and behaviors online and in the physical world”(Rouse,2018). From this, a question has been raised “how do the companies know consumer’s behaviors ?” Google, as the pioneer of the big data, is a perfect example of analysis the Surveillance Capitalism. As advertising is one of the fastest, most cost-effective and effective ways of transmitting information, many companies have chosen this marketing channel to promote their products and services. Those companies have been using special methods and technical support to hide the fact that they are actually capturing customers info into their systems. Advertising is ubiquitous in our daily life, i.e, TV, bus stop, Youtube and many other types of promotions. What caught my attention was once that I received an email about a pair of shoes and then I browsed on Youtube, I was surprised by the advertisement before the video was exactly about the shoes. I was shocked. It feels like my personal information has been leaked. Email is a very private and important platform for people to communicate, especially at work. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, Google allows hundreds of outside software developers to read and store personal information from millions of the company’s customers, as long as they have consented(Evans, 2018). This is how google share user information to third parties. Although in 2018, Google has claimed that they “would no longer scan people’s Gmail emails for keywords that could be used to target ads at them”(Meyer,2018). What makes people more worrying is that “the possibility of those third-party services sharing users’ data with other third parties” (Meyer,2018). Google, one of the biggest data company, it really disappoints many users.

Though, I used an ad blocker to block all the advertising on my computer and phone in order to skip the advertisements and prevent my personal information leak. Anyhow, everything has two sides, ad blocker can save some time by skipping the advertisements but does it really safe? As Stommel and Michael said that we need to see what the tools say they do and comparing that to what they actually do (Stommel&Michael, 2018). According to an independent security researcher, he found that “eight browser extensions used by around 4 million Firefox and Chrome users were harvesting data”(O’Flaherty, 2019). The leaked data is not only the personal purchase habits but also including “tax returns, GPS location, cloud services, and data, file attachments, credit card information, genetic profiles and online shopping history”(O’Flaherty, 2019). People should be aware of the harm of Internet personal information disclosure.

What are the consequences of disclosing personal information? First of all, the user’s personal property is threatened. Criminals can collect personal information from an illegal way and analyze the characteristics of the user to conduct crimes. For example, I have received a call, the person in the call saying that I had a package seized by Chinese customs. In the package, there are some passports that belong to money laundering crimes. On the call, he can accurately provide my personal information. Fortunately, I have heard this kind of case in social media, otherwise, I don’t know what the consequences will happen. Secondly, leaking information does not only lead threats to individuals, but also nations and companies. If criminals sell the information to a company’s competitors, it will cause huge loss. Suppose the company that corporate with the nation confidential has been leaked, it also poses a threat to national security. For instance, in 2016, there were about 50 million Turkish citizens’ information has been leaked, including the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan(Tait,2016). The leaked information including national identity numbers, addresses, dates of birth and names of parents that are downloadable in a 6.6 GB file(Tait,2016). This leak becomes the major breach for the Turkish authorities. The last threaten of personal information leaking is undermined personal reputation. Although leaking private information causes serious threats to individuals, companies, and counties, it is even more frightening that privacy leaks can affect a person’s reputation. All the bad things that others have done under your name are your responsibilities to deal with. In the end, even though you might be able to prove innocence, personal reputation is still undermined.

Therefore, individuals need to be aware of all the possibilities of leaking information. Users who post sensitive information and share their locations on social media will easily be targeted by hackers or criminals. As well as the internet questionnaire that requires fill in users personal information. According to Hern and Cadwalladr, Aleksandr Kogan collected the information of Facebook users once they download his This Is Your Digital Life app (Hern&Cadwalladr, 2018). Even more, The author said that “For the users who did install the app, potentially their entire mailbox history was uploaded”(Hern&Cadwalladr, 2018). Although Facebook and Kogan refused to admit everything, the Facebook users who downloaded the app and being information leaked are the best witnesses. In addition, citizens should raise their awareness of self-protection, the government should also take action as well. The government website operation management needs to fix the leak immediately to stop more victims get involved. Also, supervisors of internet security can use 24/7 technique to monitor personal information. Once the problems are founded, specialists can use social media to warn citizens in order to minimize the damage of personal information leak and state secrets. Other than this, the reporters or issuers before they publish articles and news, they need to be careful that all personal information does not appear. If all levels of the judiciary can immediately crackdown on information disclosure crimes from today, it will not be difficult for the public to regain a sense of security about personal privacy.

Network supervision is undoubtedly an urgent task. It is not an exaggeration to say that everyone is facing the threat of personal privacy disclosure. Though, every person needs to take responsibility to protect personal information in order to avoid losses.

References

Evans, P.(2018). Google faces criticism for giving 3rd-party apps access to user emails. CBC News. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gmail-privacy-security-1.4733533

Hern, A., & Cadwalladr, C. (2018, April 13). Revealed: Aleksandr Kogan collected Facebook users’ direct messages. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/revealed-aleksandr-kogan-collected-facebook-users-direct-messages

Meyer, D. (2018). Google Admits That It Lets Outside Services Share Your Gmail Data. Retrieved from https://fortune.com/2018/09/21/google-gmail-privacy-data-third-parties/

Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). A Guide for Resisting Edtech: The Case Against Turnitin. An Urgency of Teachers. Retrieved from: https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/a-guide-for-resisting-edtech-the-case-against-turnitin/

O’Flaherty, K. (2019,). Data Leak Warning Issued To Millions Of Google Chrome And Firefox Users. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/07/19/data-leak-warning-issued-to-millions-of-google-chrome-and-firefox-users/#5b6ac1b43ded

Rouse,M.(2018).What is surveillance capitalism? – Definition from WhatIs.com. Retrieved from https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/surveillance-capitalism

Tait, R. (2016, April 4). Personal details of 50 million Turkish citizens leaked online, hackers claim. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/personal-details-of-50-million-turkish-citizens-leaked-online-ha/

Research paper draft

by zoeluo

On August 12, 2019

In Distributed & Open Learning, EdTechUVic

surveillance capitalism, data, and privacy

In the era of rapid development of the technology and network, they bring us more convenient and advanced life. The numbers of channels for people to gain information will increase and also the timeliness and effectiveness of information will also be stronger. However, while using the network to facilitate our life, people should also pay attention to network security issues, like personal information leak, fraud, internet addiction and so on. Today, unauthorized disclosure of personal information is one of the major problems that people should raise awareness of information protection.

In our daily life, everyone knows to protect theirs privacy and will not easily give personal details to other people. However, on another level, we seem to be naked in this era of information development. We expose our personal information inadvertently, like online shopping, registering an account, filling out a questionnaire and participating in a lucky draw.In the past decade, a term of Surveillance Capitalism has appeared in the visual field of public. The professor of Harvard University, Shoshanna Zuboff in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” coined a term “Surveillance Capitalism” which is “the monetization of data captured through monitoring people’s movements and behaviors online and in the physical world”(Rouse,2018). From this, a question has been raised “how does the companies know consumer’s behaviors ?” Google, as the pioneer of the big data, is a perfect example of analysis the Surveillance Capitalism. As the Advertising is one of the fastest, most cost-effective and effective ways of transmitting information, many company choose this way to promote. Hence, it have been using technology that hidden under advertising to capture as much user data as possible. Advertising is everywhere in our daily life, i.e, TV, bus stop, Youtube and many other types of promotion. What caught my attention was once that I receive an email about a pair of shoes and then I open the Youtube, I was surprised by the advertisement before the video was exactly about the shoes. In addition to the surprise, I was shocked. It feels like my personal information has been leaked. Email is a very private and important platform for people to communicate, especially in work. However, according to Wall Street Journal, Google allows hundreds of outside software developers to read and store personal information from millions of the company’s customers, as long as they have consented(Evans, 2018). This is how google share user information to the third parties. Although in 2018, google claimed that they “would no longer scan people’s Gmail emails for keywords that could be used to target ads at them”(Meyer,2018). What makes people more worrying is that “the possibility of those third-party services sharing users’ data with other third parties” (Meyer,2018). Google, one of the biggest data company, it really disappoints many users.

Hence, I used ad blocker to block all the advertising on my computer and phone in order to skip the advertisements and prevent my personal information leak. Anyhow, everything has two sides, as blocker can save some times by skipping the advertisements but does it really safe? As Stommel and Michael said that we need to see what the tools say they do and comparing that to what they actually do (Stommel&Michael, 2018). According to an independent security researcher, he found that “eight browser extensions used by around 4 million Firefox and Chrome users were harvesting data”(O’Flaherty, 2019). The leaked data is not only the personal information, but also including “tax returns, GPS location, cloud services and data, file attachments, credit card information, genetic profiles and online shopping history”(O’Flaherty, 2019). People should be aware of the harm of Internet personal information disclosure.

What is the consequences of disclosing personal information? First of all, user’s personal property is threatened. Criminals can collect the personal information from illegal way and analyze the characteristics of the user to conduct crimes. For example, I have received a call, the person in the call saying that I had a package that seized by Chinese customs. In the package, there are some passports that belong to money laundering criminal. On the call, he can accurately provide my personal information. Fortunately, I have heard this kind of case in the social media, otherwise, I don’t know what the consequences will happen. Secondly, leaking information does not only lead threats to individuals, but also nation and company. If criminals sell the information to a company’s competitors, it will cause huge loss. Suppose the company that corporate with the nation confidential has been leaked, it also poses a threat to national security. For instance, in 2016, there were about 50 million Turkish citizens’ information has been leaked, including the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan(Tait,2016). The leaked information including national identity numbers, addresses, dates of birth and names of parents that are downloadable in a 6.6 GB file(Tait,2016). This leak becomes the major breach for the Turkish authorities. The last threaten of personal information leaking is undermined personal reputation. Although leaking private information cause serious threats to individuals, companies and counties, it is even more frightening that privacy leaks can affect a person’s reputation. All the bad things that others have done under your name are your responsibilities to deal with. In the end, you may be able to prove that you are innocent, but the things have happened, personal reputation is still undermined.

Therefore, individuals need to be aware of all the possibilities of leaking information. Users who post sensitive information and share their locations in social media will easily be the target for the hackers or criminals. As well as the internet questionnaire that requires fill in users personal information. According to Hern and Cadwalladr, Aleksandr Kogan collected the information of Facebook users once they download his This Is Your Digital Life app (Hern&Cadwalladr, 2018). Even more, The author said that “For the users who did install the app, potentially their entire mailbox history was uploaded”(Hern&Cadwalladr, 2018). Although Facebook and Kogan refused to admit everything, the Facebook users who downloaded the app and being information leaked are the best witnesses. In addition to citizens should raise their awareness of self-protection, the government should also take some actions. The government website operation management need to fix the leak immediately to prevent more people involved in. Also, supervisors of internet security can use 24 hours technique to monitor the personal information. Once the problems are founded, specialists can use social media to warn citizens in order to minimize the damage of personal information leak and state secrets. Other than this, the reporters or issuers before they publish articles and news, they need to be careful that all personal information does not appear. If all levels of the judiciary can immediately crack down on information disclosure crimes from today, it will not be difficult for the public to regain a sense of security about personal privacy.

Network supervision is an urgent task. It is not an exaggeration to say that everyone is facing the threat of personal privacy disclosure. All of individuals need to take responsibility to protect personal information To avoid losses.

Reference:

Evans, P.(2018). Google faces criticism for giving 3rd-party apps access to user emails. CBC News. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gmail-privacy-security-1.4733533

Meyer, D. (2018). Google Admits That It Lets Outside Services Share Your Gmail Data. Retrieved from https://fortune.com/2018/09/21/google-gmail-privacy-data-third-parties/

Rouse,M.(2018).What is surveillance capitalism? – Definition from WhatIs.com. Retrieved from https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/surveillance-capitalism

Showcase Post

by zoeluo

On August 9, 2019

In Distributed & Open Learning, EdTechUVic

Original Blog post: https://zoeluocj.opened.ca/2019/08/02/blog-2-internet-security-and-privacy/

Internet Security and Privacy – cont.

In this digital era, the number of internal users and online usages have grown exponentially. There are approximately 2.5 quintillion data being generated every day. Because of this, the emphasis would be on how to properly use the data and secure user info. Meanwhile, there are platforms that would store users’ information in their back end system, for instance, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Turnitin, which is the lead of this writing.

Turnitin is an online tool that has a plagiarism detection service to evaluate whether a piece of work is similar to other works in its database. I have personally used this platform several times before. I found it is a very useful tool to validate my academic integrity. However, after I have finished reading “A guide for resisting edtech: the case against Turnitin”, I realized that how Turnitin uses our work is indeed very critical to us. Privacy on academic performance is an issue that I have never thought of before, assuming a trusted platform would not use my work in other usages. In the article “A Guide for Resisting Edtech”, the authors, Morris and Stommel have illustrated the dilemma of submitting work online through Turnitin. Turnitin has been renowned to cooperate with educational institutions to ensure students’ works are original and non-plagiarized. However, according to Turnitin’s terms of services, “If you submit a paper or other content in connection with the Services, You hereby grant to Turnitin, its affiliates, vendors, service providers, and licensors a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to use such papers, as well as feedback and results, for the limited purposes of a) providing the Services, and b) for improving the quality of the Services generally.” (Morris & Stommel, 2018), we, Turnitin users, do not possess the full right of our own work. The authors have criticized that Turnitin has “create a hostile environment” in classrooms, “undermine students’ authority” over their own work and violate student privacy”(Morris & Stommel, 2018). I am not saying that we should stop using Turnitin immediately, but rather, we should suggest Turnitin to amend their TOS, in order to take away the confusion from users and other stakeholders.

Furthermore, there are many educational tools online claim that they will help students to better keep track of their study progresses. Though, not all of them are non-profit, including Turnitin. The fuse that draws in everyone’s attention is from a non-profit educational technology company, called inBloom. It is a company founded in the United States that “aimed to store, clean, and aggregate a wide range of student information for states and districts”(Herold,2014). However, this company only survived for 15 months because they leaked out students’ personal and sensitive information to other educational company. Of course, this action is not appreciated by the students, parents, as well as the society due to the violation of privacy. Eventually, public protests and judgments have pressurized the company to apologize and to shut down. This is not the first time that personal information was being leaked from the educational sector. Students, educators, and educational organizations should pay extra attention to prevent privacy leakage in the future.

In fact, apart from the privacy of academic integrity, the privacy on personal info is also at utmost importance to society. Take Facebook as an example, there was a personal information leak happened in 2018. Since Facebook requested all Facebook users the authority to exploit their private information, Facebook has the rights to sell or reuse all personal info that Facebook has collected, without notice to users. That is a possible reason why Facebook ads were successful: they exploited users’ info to generate possible products and services that may appeal to a specific group of people using the Facebook algorithm. However, while Facebook is making profits from users, it has failed to protect its users. A software glitch in the Facebook system was found and attacked by hackers in 2018. According to The New York Times, this incident has exposed more than 50 million users’ info, including the top executives, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg, on the internet (Isaac & Frenkel, 2018). To avoid the same pitfall in the future, Facebook has changed their TOS, explicitly stating that “We don’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and we don’t share information that directly identifies you (such as your name, email address or other contact information) with advertisers unless you give us specific permission.”(Facebook, 2019). In addition, Facebook has improved its security system to minimize the eventuality in the future.

To summarize, Turnitin and other educational platforms as a trusted tool for students to prove their learning and studying should protect students’ information and take extra caution in the TOS. Beside of this, all the social platforms that collect users information must have countermeasures to protect users information.

Reference：

Facebook official website(2019). Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Herold, B. (2014, April 21). InBloom to Shut Down Amid Growing Data-Privacy Concerns. Retrieved from https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2014/04/inbloom_to_shut_down_amid_growing_data_privacy_concerns.html

Isaac,M., & Frenkel, S. (2018). Facebook Security Breach Exposes Accounts of 50 Million Users. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html

Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). A Guide for Resisting Edtech: The Case Against Turnitin. An Urgency of Teachers. Retrieved from: https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/a-guide-for-resisting-edtech-the-case-against-turnitin/

Blog 4

by zoeluo

On August 7, 2019

In Distributed & Open Learning, EdTechUVic

Towards the open education

Been reading through this unit, two interesting aspects have stood out to me from the open education that pushes me to investigate more. They are Open Pedagogy and Open Platforms. The fact that I did not prefer to discuss more on the rest of the topics is that they are quite self-explanatory. Open Participation: literally means everyone could get involved in the open learning courses or workshops; Open Permission: refers to a set of rules allowing people to reuse teaching materials; Open Policies: describes all open education areas to be justified and empowered.

Though, in the Open Pedagogy section, it is vague that if there are no restrictions on the selection of teaching materials. Open pedagogy refers to a set of openly licensed materials available on the market which are free to use and revise for teaching aspects. Different lecturers, or different institutions, would, of course, use different materials to educate their students. With that being said, does it really helps students obtain knowledge? Students who lectured by different professors may learn and perceive knowledge differently, which would possibly create a knowledge gap. It would also undermine the intellectual property rights of the original authors of textbooks and contributors. In the article, Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs), are questioned by their effectiveness on teaching using open materials, “… Participation tends to be restricted to accessing freely accessible pre-packaged materials; although called OER, they generally cannot be re-purposed and redistributed. Also, participation in social networked communities of learners is not always a component of the learning design; therefore, the xMOOC pedagogy is considered dubious and not always of high quality, and it does not appear to be compliant with many aspects of an open pedagogy…”. In other words, it may turn out a dilemma to use open materials, since if professors use OERs, they do not have full access to change the content of the materials; and if they do, it would harm to the intellectual property and the academic credentials of the scholars.

Second of all, Open Platforms, such as Wikipedia, WordPress, open API, are available for everyone to use without any restrictions. However, those platforms are not academic professional due to the nature that everyone on the internet could revise the contents online. Those platforms execute the 5Rs, which are retained, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. If teachers do use those materials, they have to verify everything on the materials or the content might be biased, incorrect, outdated, fraudulent, or hostile. In the article, Ehlers has claimed that “OEP can change learning environments so that “knowledge is co-created and facilitated through mutual interaction and reflection” by teachers and students.” However, the gathered knowledge might not be accurate and academically defended. Students could not fully confide the materials, which would lead to a deficiency and discouragement in the learning behaviors.

To conclude, it is undoubted that open education has lowered the barriers to learning and stimulated innovations. Notwithstanding the openness of learning, there are some factors, not only the ones I illustrated above, would, intrinsically, impact the effectiveness of learning in turn.

References

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources. Educational Technology, 55(4), 3-13. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/44430383

Blog 3

by zoeluo

On August 4, 2019

In Distributed & Open Learning, EdTechUVic

The relationship between social media live streams and learners

People in the old days could only learn new knowledge or skills in school, which has greatly restricted the overall level of learning in the past. Though, the internet today allows us to look for and understand anything and anywhere if we prefer. In other words, anyone who desires for knowledge could find something useful online to learn and study. Specifically, the University of British Columbia would consistently invite scholars, successful entrepreneurs, and alumni to give speeches in school. While not everyone could attend the section and not a single classroom could fit all the audiences, UBC Sauder School of Business decided to put on live-streaming on social media, i.e. Facebook, Instagram. Learners who would like to know more from those kinds of webinars would receive notification and they can watch it during the Livestream or review them afterward. Therefore, they will not miss anything important even if they do not physically attend the event. Some people may argue that live-streaming on social media would distract learners and even lead to a deficiency of learning. However, according to the American Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) annual teacher survey on media and technology, the majority of teachers believe that video and live streaming are actually effective learning tools in which 68% of teachers believe that video stimulates discussions; 66% of teachers believe that video increases student motivation, and 41% of teachers believe that video increases student achievement.

Technically, with live streaming, students will be able to watch the scholars or profs or experts to solve problems and answer their questions in real-time, which is more productive when it comes to learning. Therefore, studies have shown that students would learn more when they are able to visualize the materials. Livecode.com, for instance, is an online platform that lets thousands of online users learn to code every day by watching programmers to create codings and applications.

Live-streaming is just one of the features of social media has nowadays, social networking could even offer online interviews, job training, meetings on social media platforms, and other online collaborations.

References

Managuelod, P. (2019, May 07). 5 Tools For Live Education Broadcasting. Retrieved from https://www.dacast.com/blog/5-tools-for-live-education-broadcasting/

Blog 2-Internet Security and Privacy

by zoeluo

On August 2, 2019

In Distributed & Open Learning, EdTechUVic

Question:

You've read and viewed a lot about data and privacy in technology in general and educational technology specifically. What stands out to you? Use one or more of the activities you explored to inspire Blog Post #2.

My response:

Turnitin is an online tool that has a plagiarism detection service to evaluate whether a piece of work is similar to other works in its database. I have personally used this platform several times before. I found it is a very useful tool to validate my academic integrity. However, after I have finished reading “A guide for resisting edtech: the case against turnitin”, I realized that how turnitin uses our work is indeed very critical to us. Privacy on academic performance is an issue that I have never thought of before, assuming a trusted platform would not use my work in other usages. In the article, the authors have illustrated the dilemma of submitting work online through turnitin. Turnitin has been renowned to cooperate with educational institutions to ensure students’ works are original and non-plagiarized. However, according to Turnitin’s terms of services, “If You submit a paper or other content in connection with the Services, You hereby grant to Turnitin, its affiliates, vendors, service providers, and licensors a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to use such papers, as well as feedback and results, for the limited purposes of a) providing the Services, and b) for improving the quality of the Services generally.” (Morris & Stommel, 2018), we, turnitin users, do not possess the full right of our own work. The authors have criticized that Turnitin has “create a hostile environment” in classrooms, “undermine students’ authority” over their own work, and violate student privacy”(Morris & Stommel, 2018). I am not saying that we should stop using turnitin immediately, but rather, we should suggest turnitin to amendment their TOS, in order to take away the confusion from users and other stakeholders.

In fact, apart from the privacy on academic integrity, the privacy on personal info is also utmost important to society. Take Facebook as an example, there was a personal information leak happened in 2018. Since Facebook requested all Facebook users the authority to exploit their private information, Facebook has the rights to sell or reuse all personal info that Facebook has collected, without notice to users. That is a possible reason why Facebook ads were successful: they exploited users’ info to generate possible products and services that may appeal to a specific group of people using Facebook algorithm. However, while Facebook is making profits from users, it has failed to protect their users. A software glitch in Facebook system was found and attacked by hackers in 2018. According to The New York Times, this incident has exposed more than 50 millions users’ info, including the top executives, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, on the internet (Isaac & Frenkel, 2018). To avoid the same pitfall in the future, Facebook has changed their TOS, explicitly stating that “We don’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and we don’t share information that directly identifies you (such as your name, email address or other contact information) with advertisers unless you give us specific permission.”(Facebook, 2019). In addition, Facebook has improved their security system to minimize the eventuality in the future.

To summarize, Turnitin, as a trusted platform that has been used internationally, should take extra caution in the TOS.

Reference：

Facebook official website(2019). Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Isaac,M., & Frenkel, S. (2018). Facebook Security Breach Exposes Accounts of 50 Million Users. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html