Privacy and Confidentiality have always been a big issue in regards to new media. There have been both positive and negative outcomes that stem from this problem. One popular argument is that social media platforms such as Myspace and especially Facebook infringe upon one's privacy. If privacy settings are not strictly controlled, people that you may not be friends with can view your profiles, pictures, and comments. Instances have happened where people have been fired from their workplace, students have been rejected from school admissions or arrested for things they said online. Even teachers have been fired for their comments about students on Facebook, comments that they thought were private.
Though most people are now aware of these privacy issues, some still neglect to block their social media sites to people they do not know. Even after blocking on Facebook, the new privacy settings now either let all your friends see what you write on other people's walls, or block them completely and makes your own wall unavailable to others to write on. For those who know what I mean, that can be a very annoying setting as you can no longer adjust the privacy settings to your personal liking as you once were able to.
However, at times, there is a benefit to these privacy shortcomings. When teens run away, their Facebooks or Myspaces can give clues as to where they are. They might be communicating with their friends and police or parents may try and go onto these sites to ask the child's friends for help. Parents can also go onto their kid's sites to try and monitor their activities. Police have also been using social media platforms to catch crooks by similarly monitoring suspects pages and that of their friends. Although these people may have privacy settings enabled on their pages, I'm sure there is a way that law enforcement officials/task forces may get access to restricted areas from the providers of these social media sites. In closing, privacy and confidentiality are very closely related to social media in both good and bad ways.
That's a great point you made about privacy shortcomings. I never thought of it that way, using a Facebook page to search for a run away teen. I guess there are positive and negative aspects for everything.
ReplyDeleteIt can definitely be frustrating to not be able to customize your privacy settings over social networks to your liking. Its also hard to limit what people can and cant see for other reasons such as Google storing caches of almost anything uploaded to the internet.
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