On Social Networking and Privacy

It's no secret that Social Networking has changed our lives. Applications such as Facebook and MySpace have enabled us to reach out to new people, renew old friendships, and keep existing ones from drifting away to oblivion. It allows us to share our thoughts, feelings, and opinions in a community setting surrounded by a select group of friends, and not the general public. It seems like social networking has changed our lives for the better...

At least while we're still young that is. You see, some of us are a little bit more outspoken than others. Some of us, like to share information about ourselves freely. Some of us, give out a little too much information.

In other words, some of us will be burned in the future. This is explained in the article, "Social Networking Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship."

Acquisti and Gross (2006) argue that there is often a disconnect between students' desire to protect privacy and their behaviors, a theme that is also explored in Stutzman's (2006) survey of Facebook users and Barnes's (2006) description of the "privacy paradox" that occurs when teens are not aware of the public nature of the Internet.

I think we've all heard this at one point in our lives, whether it was a talk from our parents warning us to watch out what we did on the internet, or, in my case, from a letter sent home during high school from the headmaster, effectively telling our parents that some of their kids were embarrassing themselves on the internet. Most of us didn't listen, or at least I didn't. I didn't think of it as an issue for myself.

The good part of this all is that young people are beginning to realize the inherent dangers of social networking, as explained in Boyd and Ellison's article:

Pew found that 55% of online teens have profiles, 66% of whom report that their profile is not visible to all Internet users (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). Of the teens with completely open profiles, 46% reported including at least some false information.

Unfortunately, there are still 34 percent that sill don't get the picture. For my part, I try to read everything I post, and consider the ramifications. Unfortunately, I am not perfect. What about you? Is privacy and security always on your mind while browsing?