According to Kang (in the article entitled ‘Is internet privacy dead? No, just more complicated: researchers), there are approximately 10 billion Tweets sent and 400 million Facebook users that are sharing their personal information through the internet. This shows that there are billions of people in the world who wants to be heard. However, are these people aware that they are consciously allowing their privacy to be invaded by others? Those who are aware may take precaution as to revealing information only to small circle of people, close friends and relatives while those who does not would just allow their information to be viewed publicly (Gross & Acquisti, 2005).
In addition, half the users on Facebook who accepts friend requests and adds people in this social networking site are anonymous. This means that they are taking a risk if they were to post something like, “Yay, will be leaving to Japan on vacation for a whole week with my whole family...”, in Facebook for example. When one posts this status, he or she is indirectly saying that they will be no one at home on guard. Hence, if one of his/her ‘Facebook friends’ who happens to be a robber sees this, will this person be tempted to rob this house where nobody is going to be home? On the other hand, Ahmed (2009), a CNN reporter reported that police used Facebook to stop crime where a security-camera video was posted showing images of a man trying to break into a safe.
An example of the security setting that is not customized for a normal user:
Based on this picture, it is seen that the user is allowing everyone (friends or strangers that was added into account) to view his status, hence risking the safety of his home.
According to Dwyer, Hiltz and Passerini (2007), people uses social networking sites for various purposes; to communicate and retain relationship with old friends, to update activities done by a group of friends via photo sharing, to meet new friends or to keep up with the trend. Hence, nobody would know what another’s motives are, whether or not they are a friend or a threat to you and your family. In my opinion, when joining a social networking site, the security and privacy of the site has to be strong as I would not want to risk losing anything in life just because of one particular website. Lastly, to cater to different types of users, social networking sites such as Facebook has to provide privacy settings that allows alteration on privacy level where they have and results shows that they did not lose any users but gain more as time passes.
Another example of that shows a customized security setting:
Based on this picture, the user is only telling his friends that he is leaving on vacation and not the whole public, which is safer.
References:
Ahmed, S 2009, ‘New Zealand police use Facebook to stop crime’, CNN.com/Technology, viewed 1st June 2010, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/14/nz.facebook.arrest/index.html
Dwyer, C, Hiltz, SR & Passerini K 2007, Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites:
A comparison of Facebook and MySpace, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, USA.
Gross, R & Acquisti, A 2005, Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks, Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, USA.
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