Protecting or Sharing, Are You Aware Of Your Settings?

Everyone exposes their information and different views on ideas through their postings on the internet. Some of the popular sites where these land on are the ever so popular Facebook and Twitter.

Source: Cortright, D 2009.

Many of Facebook and Twitter users are not fully aware of their privacy settings. Many users are sharing information every second, through pictures, tweets, postings, and status updates. Through a social media research at Microsoft Research New England, Danah Boyn, shows that many people only feel like their privacy has been violated when they have lost all control of their personal information.

Source:Flickr, 2008.

According to Facebook TRUSTe (2010), Facebook creates privacy policies and guidelines to help protect many users information.I personally don't think the privacy given to the users is very sufficient. This definitely doesn't do justice because although many feel this same way, they continue to use the social networking sites. Facebook seems to keep making adjustments to help to improve and deal with the privacy issues.

source: Flickr, 2011

These improvements allow users to either allow their information to be viewed by others or in a more secure aspect and only visible to a select group. Facebook predicted that the number of users would decrease, but it seems as if it was otherwise, numbers increased. I believe that the issue of privacy comes from the users lack of knowledge of the people who use these networking sites. Some of them do not even notice or care about the privacy issues. Many of the Facebook users are publishing their comments, ideas, and posting pictures without checking to see if they have establish the privacy settings that they desire. When users found out their information can be found anywhere on the internet, they started to worry. So, I think, we cannot just get upset with these social networking sites if we have never done anything to help make our sites more secure. All in all, the privacy policy is already provided. It is now dependent on the users whether want to keep their information protected or shared.


Refrences:

Cortright, D 2009, Cleansing my Facebook Profile, http://www.kpao.org/blog/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy.jpg

Facebook TRUSTe (2010), Facebook’s Privacy Policy, viewed 15 June 2010, http://www.facebook.com/policy.php.

Flicker 2007, Facebook Privacy Setting, http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1045/795842899_5e126db289.jpg

Franzese, Greg 2009, Facebook Privacy, viewed 16 June 2010, http://www.reputationdefenderblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/facebook-privacy.jpg

Key Security Settings Every Facebook User Should Know!

Facebook arguably contains many privacy settings many users are unaware about when they are posting various things to their sites.  PC world does an excellent way of covering many of these settings make sure users are adequately taking advantage of these settings.

One of the few options users may be unaware of is the information your friends can share about you. When your friends use applications for games are various others, the apps can request information about their friends that could include you. Information could very well include your whole facebook profile. To avoid this you can go to your privacy settings and select apps and edit the boxes that are your friends are accessible to

Social Ads are often displayed to the right of your facebook page; they often affiliate your friends with “liking” a particular ad so that you will be more drawn to “like” it as well. Some ads have been known to automatically associate users with an ad just because their friend liked it. To ensure that this doesn’t happen to you, you must edit this feature in your privacy settings.

Forgetting to sign-out of facebook from a office or at home somewhere is a mistake that I too make.  Facebook offers a feature that allows you to sign out remotely. By signing up for this remote service, Facebook will send you text messages, and or, emails telling you when someone that you were unaware of has logged your facebook in elsewhere, maybe.

Facebook accounts can be searched on Google. By allowing this feature, people will be able to access your account from a 2^nd party. In order to undo this action you will need to go to your facebook privacy settings and edit the public search option. This is something that I was unaware of and will be readily taking this into account.

Introduction: Privacy

Privacy is one of those many topics that come to mind to many Internet users whether it is signing up for a social media page or giving out personal information when making a purchase online. For me, I believe privacy among many social media sites are taken for granted, which can often lead to humiliation, or even cyber bullying. I believe as Internet users we should take a certain value into our privacy and create restrictions for ourselves, to help prevent certain fiascos from happening. Many can and will argue that the Internet did kill privacy. In my opinion, I believe it did. Many felt that by providing the internet with such private information they are being” friendly” on facebook or twitter, or “trying” to meet new friends.  This can be both true and false, yes you are meet new friends but are these strangers really your “friends” or are they out there to find ways to humiliate or even possibly cause harm to you? These are questions that I ask myself before joining social networks. I also tend to have extreme regard to who I allow to have access to my pages, which can see my pictures, wall post, and most importantly whom I allow to be my “ friend”.