Social networking sites are being used by a growing number of people, however many people do not realise the potential dangers of having personal information shared. Facebook has been criticised in particular for this. When reading Facebook's Privacy Policy it says that some information can be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged on to Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and can be imported, exported and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Therefore privacy is not completely in our control. Personal information from profiles and from using applications/games are being used for marketing/advertising purposes which can be be criticised for bring unethical.
It is up to an individual how much personal information they want to give out, however users should be more aware of the consequences and dangers. Younger vulnerable Facebook users are especially at risk as they may not understand how to privatise their information from everyone and may see Facebook as a 'popularity contest' accepting friend requests from strangers in order to look "cool" as there is a social expectation to connect with everyone you know. Children can be exposed to paedophiles easily as there are people out there who will go to the lengths of creating fake Facebook profiles. A major problem with Facebook is that it does not verify a users' real identity, I believe if there was a way to do so; fake profiles, identity theft etc would not be an issue. If people had to use their real identity, they may be less likely to want to create a fake profile for criminal purposes.
As a Facebook user myself, I found it difficult to achieve maximum privacy, I wanted to make my profile picture private to only my friends lists; however it is not even an option on Facebook. You should be able to control who you want your profile picture available to. The level of privacy should be assessed in my opinion and barriers for data leaking should be implemented.
What are your views on Facebook and its privacy settings, do you have any concerns? Will there always be issues? What about other social networking sites, do they have any major privacy/security issues?
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I think Facebooks privacy settings have always been terrible and difficult to follow and implement mainly because they are always changing their privacy rules. Fake profiles are a problem with every major networking site as you are trusting the user to his/her social networking profile correctly, so I think this will always be a problem. I do not use other social networking sites so I do not know how their privacy settings work, but facebook always gets pulled out from the rest on security and privacy. No more of an example is the timeline feature of facebook which is causing major controversy. Social Networking will always cause our privacy to decrease and unless we delete our profiles and never use social networking this will always be an issue.
ReplyDeleteThere has been controversy over how content(photos, information etc) will still be owned by Facebook even if we delete our profiles..What do you think about this? The Facebook Timeline would provide even more information about people, so people would have to increase their account privacy and make it private before hackers steal it and could use it to their advantage. What information do you give out on Facebook and what information would you definitely not even think about sharing with the public?
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