Page 139 - Trust in ICT 2017

Trust in ICT 2

platforms try to replace the existing social networking services with fewer advertisements or more privacy.
The technical challenge is to provide privacy to the global community.

A number of anonymous social networking services with more privacy surge in popularity. Not everyone
wants every conversation over the social media to be broadcast to the world, after all. Some users are
concerned about ways the personal data is being collected, sold to advertisers, manipulated in tests, or
accessed by government agencies.

A few social media fulfil their mandates on privacy issues. Some of them have been hacked with sensitive
user photos posted. Real anonymity and privacy is extremely difficult to achieve. For privacy, some social
media allows users to create chat rooms around shared interests with no requirement to reveal their names
or locations. They allow users to conceal their identity, location, and browsing history.
• Smart devices with IoT sensors are more social

In the near future, cheap IoT sensors are included in smartphones. There is an explosion of smart devices in
home appliances like thermostats, bathroom scales and refrigerators to wearables like fitness bracelets and
smart watches. Many IoT devices are now collecting data and push notifications to smartphones. The
challenge becomes how to more intelligently integrate the fast-growing Internet of things technologies with
social media. Smart devices need to improve their social intelligence. By tapping users' social graph on their
unique network of friends or listening to social media, it is easy to track users' activities and interactions with
friends and followers.
Emergence of new media

By reviewing the existing types of media described above, there is some evidence of the emergence of new
media with advances of information and communication technology. The rise of new media has increased
communication between people all over the world. It has allowed people to express themselves through
blogs, websites, videos, pictures, and other user-generated media. New media most commonly refers to
contents available on-demand through the Internet, accessible on any digital device, usually containing
interactive user feedbacks and creative participation [27]. New media includes the existing social media such
as online newspapers, blogs, wikis, video and games. New media enables people around the world to share,
comment on, and discuss a wide variety of topics. One of the key features of new media is denoted as
interactivity among communities.

New media represents the digital forms with technologies that are manipulated, networkable,
dense, compressible, and interactive. Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, combines Internet accessible
digital texts, images, and video with web-links, creative participation of contributors, interactive feedback of
users, and formation of a participant community of editors and donors for the benefit of non-community
readers. Facebook is an example of the social media model, in which most users are also participants. As a
result of the evolution of new media technologies, virtual communities are being established online by
eliminating geographical boundaries and social restrictions. People in virtual communities use words on
screens to exchange information for life and business. New media has the ability to connect like-minded
people worldwide and feeds into the process of guiding their future development.

Although traditional social media offers a variety of opportunities for companies in a wide range of business
sectors, mobile social media makes use of the location- and time-sensitivity aspects in order to engage into
marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, relationship development, and loyalty
programs. Mobile social media offers data about offline consumer movements to online companies. Any firm
with new media can know the exact time at which a customer entered one of its outlets, as well as the
comments made during the visit. Mobile social media communication takes two forms, the first is a company-
to-consumer relationship whereby a company may establish a connection with a consumer based in its
location and provide reviews about locations nearby. The second type of communication is the result of user-
generated contents. Mobile social media allows companies to tailor promotions to specific users at specific
times. In order to increase long-term relationships with the customers, companies are able to create
premium service programmes that allow customers who check in regularly at a location to earn discounts.
Mobile social media applications are influencing an upward trend in the popularity and accessibility of e-
commerce or online purchases. Almost half of smartphone owners visit social networks every day via their

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