Social Media Private Privacy Issues
Elif Taştekin
13.15.2013
Who Owns the Information on the Internet?
“If you feel like someone is watching you, you're right … If you're not doing anything about this anxiety, you’re just like almost everyone else” (Sullivan, 2011). Social media is the new essential. Socialization, entertainment, and information source for a huge amount of people. It is almost in every area in daily life and the data entered is growing rapidly day by day. The question is who receives these data? What do they do with it? May it be harmful? These questions must have occupied almost everyone’s head at least once and it is not out of nowhere. Social networking sites have several privacy gaps that may be a threat for the personal privacy of users.
First of all, the most important issue is who receives the information given. Some of the users take precautions by limiting access to their pages. However, “It has been revealed by Ryan Segel that the privacy policies are not as strict as the users think they are. For example, on Facebook, users are can be found on searches based on religion, sexual orientation or relationship status” (2007). This situation results in strangers getting information and it may even lead to stalking. It is a big issue when the user thinks that the page is only visible to a certain group of people. In some cases, the owner of the page may not want to be reached by some people like his/her teachers, parents, employers, or employees. Furthermore some sites are claimed to be sharing the information with the third party aggregators like advertisers. For instance, according to Kate Gladdis’s article “Twitter has archived every tweet and has agreed a deal allowing the UK-based company Datasift to trawl through all those posted since January 2010. The company will use the information to help firms with marketing campaigns and target influential users” (2012). It means that all the ideas that are tweeted, even if the tweets are private, are a
13.15.2013
Who Owns the Information on the Internet?
“If you feel like someone is watching you, you're right … If you're not doing anything about this anxiety, you’re just like almost everyone else” (Sullivan, 2011). Social media is the new essential. Socialization, entertainment, and information source for a huge amount of people. It is almost in every area in daily life and the data entered is growing rapidly day by day. The question is who receives these data? What do they do with it? May it be harmful? These questions must have occupied almost everyone’s head at least once and it is not out of nowhere. Social networking sites have several privacy gaps that may be a threat for the personal privacy of users.
First of all, the most important issue is who receives the information given. Some of the users take precautions by limiting access to their pages. However, “It has been revealed by Ryan Segel that the privacy policies are not as strict as the users think they are. For example, on Facebook, users are can be found on searches based on religion, sexual orientation or relationship status” (2007). This situation results in strangers getting information and it may even lead to stalking. It is a big issue when the user thinks that the page is only visible to a certain group of people. In some cases, the owner of the page may not want to be reached by some people like his/her teachers, parents, employers, or employees. Furthermore some sites are claimed to be sharing the information with the third party aggregators like advertisers. For instance, according to Kate Gladdis’s article “Twitter has archived every tweet and has agreed a deal allowing the UK-based company Datasift to trawl through all those posted since January 2010. The company will use the information to help firms with marketing campaigns and target influential users” (2012). It means that all the ideas that are tweeted, even if the tweets are private, are a