Criteria A

Criteria A- Presentation of the issue

This portfolio addresses the issue of privacy and particularly in the field of government and politics and how concerned citizens are watching on politicians utilizing data mash-ups. Mash-ups usually come in 3 types: data mash-ups, consumer mash-ups and business mash-ups.Data mash-ups are web applications that merge the any data from more than one source all into one incorporated tool. An example for this is “using cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, hence creating a new and separate web service which was not originally predicted by either source.” (Answers.com)
The IT systems that are involved in this issue are computers, web browsers and the internet. Although data mash-ups can be useful this issue can be seen as an invasion of privacy since citizens are watching politicians every move on the web. The title of the article really tells us about how this technology is turning regular citizens into “watchdogs”. The reason why these citizens are spying on their politicians is because they are concerned of who is going to be their new president and would like to unveil and “skeletons in the closet”. Citizens are doing this by using "custom data mash-ups that use public databases to draw correlations between every vote cast and every dollar spent in Washington" (Calore, Michael 2007). With politicians becoming more corrupt and the simplicity of the internet data mash-ups have become even trendier.

As the popularity of data-mash-ups increases the privacy of politicians is now prone to be violated. Laws should be implemented and reinforced in order to stop citizens on watching the lives of their politicians to create a sense of trust between each other.