Privacy on Social Networking Sites

The following is a blog post that was part of my coursework for a paper I did at uni, called 'Technoculture and New Media.' It was definitely one of the most interesting papers I did for my degree, and I thought I'd repost them here in my own blog. You can take a look at the class blog here. It's fascinating to take a look at how much has changed in the short time since I've taken that paper in 2009.

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Recently, at my younger sister's school, there was quite a bit of drama concerning Facebook. Apparently, some students in her year level had been bullying another student through the site, as well as making derogatory comments about a teacher. In order to investigate this, their year level dean created a profile under an alias, and sent students friend requests. Even though they had no idea who this person was, many accepted the request, making their personal information and comments available for view.

Somehow, the information that their dean had created a fake profile to investigate these claims became public knowledge. According to my sister, everyone who had accepted the friend request felt that this was a huge breach of their privacy. Yet, they had readily accepted the friend request, despite not knowing who this person was, or what their intentions were. If Publish Postyou are willing to give a complete stranger that access to information on your profile, can you really say that they had no right to that information later on, even in deceitful circumstances?

Incriminating information is often posted to social networking sites, which is available to all friends on your list. These friends could be work colleagues, close friends, family, even strangers - yet all have access to the same level of personal information posted. Many users of social networking sites seem to be unaware of this, or simply don't care. They don't restrict themselves as they would in face to face conversation, resulting in some groups of people knowing more about you than you may be comfortable with. With social networking sites encouraging users to amalgamate their connections into one converged network, the boundaries of personal information are being blurred between each group, and the individual identities we keep within these groups are being converged into one.

Originally published here.