Privacy

In the past, when somebody needed/wanted information they would go to the library and search. And if one would want to search for personal information they would either ask around (friends, family or people they know) or hire an investigator. Today, it is very simple to access personal information. For example, last week I received a text message from friends’ friend, the conversation was moving towards a job offer. However, I didn’t remember what industry he worked in so I googled him and figured it out in a second. Privacy and confidentiality are huge issues when it comes to new media, in particular social networking websites. In order to create a profile in a social networking websites, one needs to add personal information. That personal information has become from private and confidential to open for the use of the general public and could be used against the same individual. Many of the social media sites ask for information such as a birthday or email address. Using such information, a hacker can easily access one’s email account. One common technique used by hackers is that of ‘forgot password’ button in order to try recovering the email of a person using email. By accessing someone’s account, the individual is able to gain access to all the information of the person for the social networking sites. In a 2012 report, Facebook has revealed that there are over 83m fake Facebook profiles, which shows the number of people hiding in Facebook (Sweney, 2012). There are other issues that occur from providing information to the different social media websites such as; identity thief, sexual harassment and stalking. One way to keep one’s private information confidential and private safe is awareness of privacy setting and blocking others from seeing certain things on one’s profile. However, personally, I don’t put too much personal information on social networking websites because of the privacy and confidentiality issues.