Module: Current Trends in Networking

Lesson: Networking technologies and social impact

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Networking technologies and social impact

Networking technologies and social impact

Networking technologies have given rise to the evolution of the Internet and its various
services. In a current day context, social networks represent an enhanced, more efficient and
more effective version of social networks as they were known before the Internet. Facebook
has the largest active user base compared to other similar sites, with WhatsApp coming a far
second. One interesting statistic mentions that 2.79 billion users (and a growth rate of 21%
CAGR) out of 3.77 billion Internet users access social media sites. Of these 2.79 billion, 2.55
billion access them from their smartphones! With the online culture proliferating every sphere
of our lives, there have been changes to lifestyle and work culture as well as social interaction.
However, with information and interaction becoming so easy, there have been both positive
and negative impacts on society.

In this lesson, we explore the facets of handling all the information around us, in terms of
privacy, ethics, anonymity and the relevant laws in the context. By the end of this lesson you
will be able to understand the social impact of networking technologies.

Social impact of Internet and network technologies

Network and Internet technologies have a huge impact on our day-to-day lives. These
technologies have revolutionised communication methods for commerce, by allowing various
computer systems to be connected throughout the world. The growth of the World Wide Web
and the increasing use of electronic mail systems and social media provide easy social
interaction. People are now using online transactions for various purposes. The development
of cloud computing allows an organisation to support its business operations remotely, in real
time.

Despite these benefits, there are complex social consequences of these technologies to our
lives. People are very worried about their privacy, the transparency of the data stored by
service providers, freedom of speech and copyright. These issues can have a huge
consequence on the use of such technologies. This lesson provides an overview of these
issues.

Privacy

Privacy is the fundamental human right of an individual to be left alone. It is the right of people
to make personal decisions regarding their own intimate matters, such as about what individual
information can be disclosed and to whom. Without privacy controls, it would be difficult to
control access by others to an individual’s information, which is why organisations handling
users’ data provide a strong privacy policy for protecting users’ information. An organisation
needs to specify clearly how it collects, processes, uses, stores and distributes users’
information.

The privacy of an individual relates to that individual’s personal data such as their credit
record, healthcare record, school records and telephone records. It is important for an
individual to know what type of personal information can be collected, how it can be collected,
processed and disseminated and how much protection should be given to the personal

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information that is stored online. However, due to the technological evolution of networking and
the Internet, it is difficult sometimes to ensure the full protection of personal information and
subsequently there can be breaches of individual privacy.

Information privacy

Information privacy deals with the confidentiality of personal information that is usually stored
on computer systems. It is also known as data privacy. This information is collected,
processed, used and disseminated for specific purposes such as health issues, loans and
bank accounts. Due to technological advancements, the processing volume of data storage,
processing and transferring will continue to increase. This advancement also leads to new
threats to privacy. It is necessary to ensure that personal information is protected from
unauthorised individuals or programs, and from both internal and external access; but it is
difficult to measure how much privacy control should be built into a system and there is no
consensus. Data should be classified based on its criticality and appropriate controls need to
take place for privacy protection.

There are several fundamental privacy properties including anonymity and unlinkability.
Anonymity means that sender and receiver must not be identified sufficiently within the
communication link by any attacker. This non-identifiable property of a subject is known as
anonymity. Anonymity can be for an individual or for a group of users, and is known as an
anonymity set.

Unlinkability is the system property (in terms of privacy) that an attacker cannot sufficiently
recognise that two data subjects are related to each other, e.g. the sender and receiver during
their communication. Therefore, unlinkability defines the inability to link the data subjects. It
can be successfully achieved between a sender and a recipient; though they can both be
identified as participating in some communication, they cannot be identified as communicating
with each other.

Transparency

Transparency is the privacy property that deals with the obligation placed on those who are
holding personal information of others. It is the right of the users to know about processing and
usage of their information. Transparency should be ensured by the service providers about
their activities with the user’s data, not only for regulatory reasons but also to ease concern
over the possibility of data leakage. Users need to understand how the data is stored, and who
is using the data. However, it is difficult to know what happens with data once it is out of the
user’s control. Transparency is an essential means to support the accountability of handling
users’ data, but there is a lack of means to achieve this. Specifically, it is difficult to control the
secondary usage of the data due to the technical advancement of attacks and user
dependency on different online based services such as cloud computing for managing the
data.

Intellectual Property (IP)

Intellectual property is a unique creative work which can be an asset or physical property. It
includes copyright, patents and trademarks such as a new product, product design, logo,
music and software-related works. An Intellectual Property Right (IPR) is part of IP law that
ensures certain exclusive rights to the owner of an asset. Protecting intellectual property
allows the owner to stop others using what the owner has created without explicit permission
such as images, music and films. For instance, a copyright owner has exclusive rights,

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protected against infringement of reproduction, modification and distribution. However, the
advancement of the Internet, high speed network facilities and user anonymity now allow users
to violate copyright with only a minimal amount of effort, typically with only the click of a
mouse.

A trademark can be a name, word, logo or symbol that identifies a product or organisation and
is registered at a national or international level with an appointed government body and the
trading rights are retained for a certain time. Registered trademarks may be identified by the
abbreviation ‘TM’, or the ‘®’ symbol, although a company’s legal rights do not depend on
whether they choose to add these identifiers. Patents protect an innovation and are mainly by
industrial processes to protect against the unauthorised implementation of the invention.

Data protection

In the UK, data protection is addressed by the Data Protection Act of 1998 (DPA). The Data
Protection Act (DPA) 1998 is a law that provides guidelines on how an organisation must
handle the personal information (data) of its clients/customers. It also provides them with the
right of access to the recorded information.

The act regulates the processing of personal data. Processing implies obtaining, recording or
holding the information or data or carrying out any operation or set of operations on the
information or data. The definition of processing is very wide and it is difficult to think of
anything an organisation might do with data that will not be processing. The act mentions three
parties in the context of the act - data subject being who the data is about, data controllers
being those who decide how and why the data is processed, and the data processor being the
person/agency (other than the employee of the data controller) that processes the data on
behalf of the data controller. The data subjects have rights and the other two parties have
duties/obligations towards the subject.

The eight data protection principles of the DPA state that personal data shall:

be processed fairly and lawfully and shall not be processed unless certain conditions are
met

be obtained for a specified and lawful purpose and shall not be processed in any manner
incompatible with that purpose

be adequate, relevant and not excessive for those purposes

be accurate and kept up to date

not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose

be processed in accordance with the data subject's rights

be kept safe from unauthorised access, accidental loss or destruction

not be transferred to a country outside the European Economic Area, unless that country
has equivalent levels of protection for personal data.

The DPA does not articulate any detailed specification of how these principles should be

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complied with, making it difficult for organisations to identify clearly what they have to do to
satisfy themselves, and others, that their management systems are compliant. This is evidently
done due to the existence of the standard BS 10012.

Currently, all organisations in the UK that collect, process or store personal information must
comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), or face fines of up to £500,000 in the event of
a data breach. The DPA will soon be superseded by the EU General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR), which prescribes considerably greater penalties - up to 4% of annual
global turnover or €20 million. All organisations that process EU residents’ data must comply
with the GDPR by 25 May 2018.

EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will unify data protection laws in the
European Union. It was adopted in April 2016 and will be enforced from 25 May 2018, when a
single set of rules will apply to all 28 EU member states. First proposed in January 2012 by the
European Commission and formally approved by the European Parliament in April 2016, the
GDPR will supersede national laws such as the UK DPA, unifying data protection and easing
the flow of personal data across the 28 EU member states.

The GDPR will introduce new rules on international data transfers, documenting data
processing activities, performing data protection impact assessments (DPIAs) and appointing
data protection officers. It will also mandate notifying the local data protection authority (in the
UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office) of data breaches within 72 hours of their
discovery. When the GDPR comes into force on 25 May 2018, all organisations that process
the personally identifiable information of EU residents will be required to abide by a number of
provisions in the regulation or face significant penalties.

Ethical issues

The basis of the information society is the information it generates and holds. Information is the
means for innovation, ideas and everything else that facilitates revenue generation. Therefore,
information is intellectual capital and its vulnerability is the cause of several incidents that could
be labelled as non-ethical actions.

There are several ethical issues of which four are very important. They are privacy, accuracy,
property and accessibility.

Privacy - Deals with what information about oneself one must reveal to others (as in people
and organisations), the conditions under which they should and under what terms. It also
deals with what information a person cannot be forced to provide. This also extends to
information held by an organisation. Two forces threaten our privacy. One is the growth of
information technology, with its enhanced capacity for surveillance, communication,
computation, storage and retrieval. A second, and more insidious threat, is the increased
value of information in decision-making. Information is increasingly valuable to
policymakers.

Accuracy - The information provided must be authentic and accurate with a high degree of
fidelity. There must be an entity that is responsible to keep up the accuracy of the
information and errors. The information provider must compensate the affected parties in
case of errors. Information systems store information in databases to make decisions. So it
is absolutely necessary to be responsible and vigilant in the pursuit of accuracy in

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 information.

Ownership - The ownership of the information is important. This determines the terms and
conditions for its exchange as well as the means and modes of exchange. The most
complex issue we face as a society is the question of intellectual property rights. There are
substantial economic and ethical concerns surrounding these rights. Any individual item of
information can be expensive to generate in the first instance. Yet, once it is produced, that
information has the illusory quality of being easy to reproduce and to share with others.
This replication can take place without destroying the original (at first, it was photocopiers!).
This makes information hard to safeguard, since it is unlike tangible property.

Access - The access to the information is regulated either by rights or by privilege. Access
when permitted is with appropriate conditions/terms as well as safeguards.

Policies vs. Law

Laws govern specific jurisdictions that are largely across a geographical area. Within
organisations, organisation-wide policies are implemented for the organisations’ employees
and business stakeholders. These policies are akin to laws with an organisation-wide
jurisdiction. If an organisation is a multinational, the policies have to align with the laws of the
multiple countries of presence.

In the context of information security, information security managers maintain the security
requirements of the organisation by enforcing the security policies. These policies function as
organisational laws, with penalties and sanctions to require compliance. The policies outline
acceptable use of resources and behaviour at the workplace. Within an organisation a policy
must be available, readable (intelligible), comprehendible, compliable with and uniformly
enforced. A policy is enforceable only if all these criteria are met. It is fairly simple for an
employee to claim to be ignorant of the policy, in her/his defence, in the event of an incident.
When the policy is enforceable, policy violation can be penalised.

Look up the policies/regulations relating to Intellectual Property, Copyrights and Data

Protection in your country/region. Mention the salient points in each of these on the Lesson 10
forum and discuss the impact on the end-user. Do you find the regulations across the
regions/countries fairly different or similar?

Take a look at the usage statistics in the article titled Essential Social Media Marketing
Statistics for 2017

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/01/05/social-media-marketing-statistics by
Wordstream (2017). What might be a typical number of hours spent online by a normal adult
user? Would you justify the time spent? Reflect on whether the time spent is productive or non-

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productive. Would you identify any negative effects, overall, of using social network sites?

Summary

The impact of networking has been the common representation of information in a digital
format. Technology has made exchange of information very trivial due to the low costs of
transfer. Several networks based services on the Internet have contributed to a change of
lifestyle as well as interactions between users. Such interactions have also extended to formal
interactions such as in businesses, requiring an introduction of policies in the workplace. Such
policies define a code of conduct for users in terms of using the information from the
workplace, as well as define the use of customer information by the service providers. This is
one of the larger impacts, requiring definition of laws to enforce privacy and ethics.

https://vimeo.com/251286214/9eaccfc00d

Transcript

Social networks have been the most impactful on users changing patterns of communications,
with aspects of business, such as advertising, achieving substantial impact (Donnelly 2017;
Wordstream 2017) over the online media.

Further and wider reading

Wider reading

Andreassen, C., Billieux, J., Griffiths, M., Kuss, D., Demetrovics, Z., Mazzoni, E. &
Pallesen, S., 2016. The relationship between addictive use of social media and video
games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large-scale cross-sectional
study. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors [online], 30(2), pp. 252-262, PsycARTICLES,
EBSCOhost. Available from: [Accessed 01 December 2017].

Bacigalupe, G., 2011. Is there a role for social technologies in collaborative

healthcare? Families, Systems, & Health [online], 29(1), pp. 1-14, PsycARTICLES,
EBSCOhost. Available from: [Accessed 01 December 2017].

De Wet, W., Koekemoer, E. & Nel, J., 2016. Exploring the impact of information and
communication technology on employees' work and personal lives: original research. SA
Journal of Industrial Psychology [online], 1, p. 1, SA ePublications Service, EBSCOhost.
Available from: [Accessed 01 December 2017].

Grobler, C. & Dhai, A., 2016. Social media in the healthcare context: ethical challenges and
recommendations. South African Journal of Bioethics and Law [online], 1, p. 22, SA
ePublications Service, EBSCOhost. Available from: [Accessed 01 December 2017].

Kessler, E., 2013. Social media and the movement of ideas. European Judaism [online], 1,
p. 26, Literature Resource Center, EBSCOhost. Available from: [Accessed 01 December
2017].

Kiesler, S., Kraut, R., Cummings, J., Boneva, B., Helgeson, V. and Crawford, A., 2002.
Internet evolution and social impact. It & Society [online], 1(1), pp.120-134. Available from:

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 [Accessed 01 December 2017].

References

Donnelly. G., 2017. 75 Super-useful Facebook Statistics for 2018. [online]. WordStream, 7
November 2017. Available from: [Accessed 01 December 2017].

Wordstream, 2017. 40 Essential Social Media Marketing Statistics for 2017. [online].
WordStream, 8 November 2017. Available from: [Accessed 01 December 2017].

Smith, D.A., 2010. Social Networks: The Next Generation. Global Futures and Foresight,
November 2010. [online] Available from: https://susp549.churchinsight.com/Groups/15224
0/Global_Futures_and/Reports/Social_Networks_the/Social_Networks_the.aspx
[Accessed 10 January 2018]

© 2018 Arden University Ltd. ALl rights reserved

© 2018 Arden University Ltd. ALl rights reserved
© 2018 Arden University Ltd. ALl rights reserved
© 2018 Arden University Ltd. ALl rights reserved
 © 2018 Arden University Ltd. ALl rights reserved

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