A social networking site can be defined as an online service that is based around the building and reflecting of social relations among individuals with common interests or social ties. Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are all different, yet the one main feature they have is that they enable users to create a profile within the website to represent themselves and allows users to interact through email, instant messaging and other communication channels within the site. The popularity and growth of social networking sites over the past years has been massive, as many people from all over the world join the social phenomenon for varied reasons. Today, there are more than 500 million active users on Facebook. As the technology advances, social networking sites have an even bigger impact on society and human relationships, both positive and negative. This paper argues that social networking sites have a negative influence on people of all ages, increase cyber bullying, personal insecurities and weaken strong personal ties as well as increase identity theft and other privacy issues and a decrease in our face to face social skills. This demonstrates that social networks do in fact cause more harm than good.
Identity theft is a huge problem in today’s society and has come about as a result of the rapid expansion and availability of internet technology and the increase in personal data found on social networking sites. MySpace, Facebook and Twitter cause identity theft in two mains ways. The first being is that they encourage you to ‘edit your profile’ which includes adding your interests, full name, where you live, your email address and even personal details like your phone number an relationship status. The more information you have on your profile about you, the easier it is for identity thieves to claim they are you. The second main issue is the privacy settings on these social networking sites