Social Media Privacy

No Privacy on Social Media Every time a photo is taken or posted on social media, the government will have access to it. There are over 66% of American adults that use a social media account on a daily basis. This includes over 900 million posts a day on Facebook and over 340 million tweets per day on Twitter (Browning). Everyone wants to share what they are doing with their friends. American adults want their friends to see what they are doing and where they are at. Through the whole world, people search Google for answers to their questions. Every time a question is asked on Google, it is kept in their database for over 18 months. There are 18.4 billion questions a day searched for on Google (Kerr). With every post on social media, a person
is putting themselves at risk that they may not even know about. Posts that are made on social media should be private so that a person can not be arrested, have litigations, or affect their working job. When a photo is taken on social media, the government can have access to it and have that person arrested. This is called face recognition. Imagine that the government can take a photo and match it to the billions of photos that are on Facebook. The match could tell them what that person’s name is, where they live, contact information, online conversations, and even their future plans. This is actually happening. People are able to change the way they look by changing a coat, hair color, or even the style of clothes that they wear; but they are not able to change the facial features or the smell of themselves. A computer is used to do facial recognition. The computer will find a photo that matches. Then they will make it gray, so there is nothing that can change what the image will look like. Also, they do this, so the background will not make a difference in matching the photos. After they have a match, they can move the pictures to identify the person from different angles. This makes it easier, so the picture does not have to be square on the face of the person. Facebook uses face recognition when they ask someone if they want to tag someone in a picture. They will have a suggested name that is usually the person. They do this based off of the other images they have been tagged in. It will zoom in on the person's face to get an accurate name (Welinder). The face recognition can lead to many different problems in privacy.
One of the problems is litigations. A litigation is the action of taking legal action. As more people are sharing their world on social media, they are putting themselves at a higher risk of someone taking them to court. In court, they can take something that was posted on social media and use it against that person. Very rarely the things that person said in court went against what they had posted on their social media account. An example of this happened in 2008. A person did not pay their mortgage lender. This person changed their phone number and their job, but did not change the privacy settings on their Facebook account. One of the person's friends added a picture of them with a location. The lender then tracked this person using their Facebook account and gave them lawsuit papers
(Browning). All the social media accounts are run by people. These people are in charge of everything that happens on that website. If the government wants information about a person or tweet, they have to go through these people and ask them for permission. This is the most privacy there is on social media. The rise of government requests on twitter has risen in the last couple of years. It is at an all time high, according to the twitter report. The government wants access to the account mostly for criminal investigation or criminal activity. The information is only given to the government 58% of the time because they are not able to say what picture or tweet they would like to look at. The United States is leading in requests, followed by Japan, Turkey, then the U.K. In the United States, 81% of the attorneys said that they use something from social media in the courtroom (Twitter). Even if attorneys are not taking what is on social media, there are 93% of employers said that they will look at the person's social media accounts before they hire them.
The employer may be able to find more information then they asked in an interview. They may find information about the sexual orientation, religion, pregnancy or race. The people who are applying for the job said that this was an invasion of their privacy. If the information is not needed in an interview, then they should not be able to find it out in another way. Employers can also look at the profile after the person is hired. They are able to make cases out of what the employees said on the social media page. Employers are firing people because of something they posted that was leaking too much information about the company or something that they make. The employee is able to place harassment charges on another employee or the boss about what they have posted about. This is also an invasion of privacy on the employee, if this is used against them. The employee has a right to post what they want to. There is a new thing in the working environment called “Facebook firing.” This means that an employer used Facebook to later fire someone they had working for them
(Browning). The employers are not the biggest problem a person can face. Most people do not know that a photo that they post on social media can contain GPS coordinates that a person can access through the metadata on a photo. The coordinates lets a person know exactly where and when the photo was taken. It also includes the longitude and latitude coordinates to give a precise location. The metadata of a photo means there is data about data. Data about data means to have information about the information that they already know. This can tell when the photo was last edited or even what was used to make or edit the picture. A person can also figure out where the photo was taken because of the signals bouncing off on cell phone towers. This is the same thing that is used when a person is using “find my iPhone” app on the iPhone. Sometimes people do not even have to dig into the photo to figure out when it was taken. All they have to do is look at the location. People can manually add this to their photos. This is very simple; when they are about to post a picture, it will ask if they want to add a location. It will pop up in places that are close to that person, including restaurants or national parks. This makes it very easy for someone to track that photo. This can still happen even if they are not the person who posted the photo. If they are “tagged” in the photo, people are still able to track the photo. It is very simple to stop this. All they have to do is untag themselves from the photo and ask the person to not “tag” them in anymore pictures they may take of them. A story of this happening was with Adam Savage. Host of the popular television show Myth-Busters. “When he posted on Twitter a photo of his vehicle parked on the street in front of his home, he was unintentionally letting some savvy viewers know exactly where he lived. How? The photo was geotagged.” He also put in this post that he was off to work, which could have allowed someone to come burglarize his home (Ramirez.) No matter what a person does on social media there is a way controlling what happens to a person on it. On all social media accounts, a person can go into the setting and go to privacy. There will be many buttons, but there will be one that says privacy to friends. If this is turned on, that means that the only people who will be able to see what they post or have access to that social media accounts are their friends. A person can also change their name on social media so that it is not their real name. When a person makes a social media account, they can only put in their basic information. This basic information will include a name (a fake one if necessary), a phone number or email, and a user name that people will be able to see. They should never put in where they live or their phone number. If they put this on there, people can easily track them or find out where they live. Also to keep a person save they should never post any kind of number that may give personal information out. The numbers can lead to clues to their passwords and can lead to people finding out credit card, social security number, or even the financial information about that person. Also, a person should never share pictures of their children or say if their children will be home alone. This can lead to people trying to break in to take the children. A person should never share any birth information. The birth information can lead to a person stealing your identity. Identity theft can take up to a year to resolve. This happens because a person who can take another person's identity usually does not live in the same state, making it hard for them to track. All of these are reasons to turn on the privacy setting on social media accounts. These are to keep a person safe. What a person can post can hurt them in ways they might not even know. All of these are reasons why people need to have more privacy on social media. There are so many things people are risking by posting stuff on social media that they might not even know about. These would be simple changes to make. All they would have to do is make a law saying that the government can not take a photo off Facebook and use it against them. We learned about facial recognition, litigations, government request, how it can affect a job, tracking the location of photos, and what a person can do to stop things from happening to them on social media. A final thought, limit the amount of people who are able to see what a person posts on social media and turn on the privacy settings in the social media account.