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Bhopu / Tags /
Online Privacy
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Posted On
Sep 19, 2007
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I have discussed a lot on social networking sites, their advantages, disadvantages, business approach, growth etc. By now, we all know that by joining a social networking service, users create personal profile and allow friends to contact them. This self-managed administrative service at times provides limited control or unlimited control over their profile visibility.
There has been an explosion in the size and number of social networking sites, resulting in some privacy issues. Today users manage more than one social networking sites, juggle between different passwords for each of them, leading to the inability to conveniently share profile across networks.
Various social networks are currently attempting to address these convenience issues, but this raises new privacy concerns and makes users even more insecure over their information.
I would like to address these privacy, security, and user convenience issues in online social networking and look out for some solutions on the same. Let me start with highlighting the social network privacy issue by explaining you the same.
Social Networking Privacy?
Cyberspace privacy is a lot different from the constitutional freedom and privacy that goes hand in hand. Whenever a huge number of people join any social network, serious privacy concerns are certain to emerge.
On the other hand, privacy in cyberspace is a whole different animal. Whenever a critical mass of people join a network community, serious privacy concerns inevitably emerge.
This platform is a channel of personal information online that positions a lot of site members at risk by displaying their private information publicly. It isn’t too late for us to look out for solutions and effectively try and apply it.
As social networking sites like as MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster have emerged as the most established forums for keeping in touch with old friends and meeting new ones. This change of information among friends have also lead to a major disadvantage of breaching information as users are releasing that their private information is being circulated far more than they would like.
In September 2006, Facebook's recently introduced News Feed feature spurred additional privacy concerns from users. Over 700,000 users signed an online petition demanding the company discontinue the feature, stating that this compromised their privacy.
Who access your information on the social networks?
The easy way to share information online, a big advantage of social networks, but are we aware of who is accessing it?
There are a number of users who intend to share information with friends and family, find its way into the hands of the authorities, strangers, the press, and the public at large.
For example, job recruiters are looking to these sites as well as performing more traditional background checks on potential employees. Performing a search using these sites may provide a lot of unedited information about a person.
The search tools provided by each site easily effects our information. Like MySpace allows the general public to search its database of members, using search terms such as a name, e-mail address, or school. This search if further filtered down to a particular country of even postal code.
This search can be filtered down to a particular country or even to a postal code. At times if users don’t change their privacy settings, searchers can view their full profile such as occupation, hometown, marital status etc.
If users included in the search results have not changed their privacy settings from the default level, searchers can view their full profiles. These profiles may include personal information such as occupation, hometown, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religion, as well as photos of users, and their friends or family.
One the other hand Facebook carries a more limited search feature. Users must be registered with the site to conduct a search, and can only view the profiles of those in their network, or of those already on their list of contacts. Some profiles viewed in this way include cell phone numbers and postal addresses. E-mail addresses always appear on Facebook profiles.
Friendster also restricts searches to members. However, members can view other users' full profiles, whether they are on the member's contact list or not. Notably, if the person searched for does not turn up in the Friendster database, the Friendster search engine provides a direct link to a data broker, which offers to search for the person.
Hence, there is a possibility that any one of a user's several hundred "friends" can download this information and use it wherever and however they wish. In fact, access can extend beyond friends and members. Users need to realize that prospective employers, job recruitment agencies, law enforcement, and members of academic staff, can gain access to photographs, comments and information posted on profile pages, whether or not this information comports with the image you would like to portray to the world outside the network.
How can users prevent this problem?
Social networking's been growing like crazy over the past year or so and companies everywhere have been scrambling to jump on the bandwagon either as advertisers or as creators of social networking sites themselves.
To the users, the good news is, social networking sites are working on progressive privacy policies. Several answers which cover many of the above-mentioned concerns should be addressed.
As good business dictates a significant online presence, we as consumers should demand more severe privacy regulations.
A lot of users are disheartened to know their information that they place online for their friends and family is viewed by people away from their interest.
Once we publish our information online, we have very little control over it. In this case right privacy settings can prevent your information to be showed to all. If the default settings are set at a higher level, users can immediately have more control.
For example if you being a user don’t want every detail of your profile available to those outside your network of friends, or did not want to allow photographs on your profile page to be downloaded can regulate their privacy settings accordingly.
Privacy and Security: How far is too far?
Concerns about security and privacy on the Internet will continue to influence social networking trends.
The September, 2006 release of Facebook's News Feed and Mini-Feed features and the ensuing reaction among Facebook users prove an excellent point about the future of social networking: users do not like it when websites sacrifice user privacy for "improved" features. Facebook users were outraged by the features, which allowed other people in the network access to continuously-updated feeds of information about them. Development in social networking technologies will likely be tempered with an undercurrent of caution. In a world where identity theft is facilitated by easy access to personal information and employers judge potential employees by analyzing their social network profiles, users will be uncomfortable with features that readily offer up too much of their personal information. Video networking could face similar roadblocks if users decide that they do not want to share their physical appearances on the Internet.
Conclusion
The future of social networking is very much up in the air. Unforeseeable technological developments and the unpredictable nature of the course of trends in popular culture make predicting the next big thing in social networking very hard. Movements toward consolidation, niche markets, video networking, and increased mobility all seem viable, but only time will tell whether these or other features come to popular fruition.
So it is nobody but the users who will have to take care of the information they decide to display online.
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