The topic I chose is globalization of social networks. This looked like an interesting topic to me because ever since the release of sites like MySpace and facebook, social networks have become a very important part in the society's identity. There are millions of facebook and twitter accounts, active accounts that are regularly checked and updated by their owners, and these numbers just keep getting higher. The whole social networking process is affecting users' privacy. If this is not taken seriously by those who publish their lives and what they do on these networks, this "open" information may affect users negatively and the sense of privacy itself might suffer a huge change. Nobody acts the same way with everyone: If making a job application, the background and resume will not be the same as if talking to a friend from last night's party. Social networks don't differ between who is looking at your profile, so this type of privacy is lost with them. Some people have even lost their jobs because of some picture that wasn't supposed to be uploaded but somehow reached facebook or twitter.
Why is this important to me? I just talked about it: Privacy is something really important and if this is not controlled, these social networks have the power to and will affect people's privacy. And not only that, networking has even become addictive to some, absorbing a lot of time in their lives which is spent doing useless things. This could, in the worst cases, affect the way people relate with each other. It is not strange to notice that some would rather talk through these networks than talking in real life, face to face.
What can I do about this? Well, the most popular networks have already implemented privacy settings that will prevent many of the negative effects of these networks. But who controls these settings are the users. My goal is to find ways to encourage social networkers to pay more attention to privacy and prevent these users from becoming addicted to these networks.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSocial networks are becoming a vessel for a wide spectrum of cybercrime, most notably cyberbullying, and in some cases identity theft when users are suckered into giving malicious applications access to their profile information.
ReplyDeleteCompounding this risk of becoming subject to cybercrime is the addiction factor introduced with the advent of a popular technology like Facebook and Twitter. Using the sites becomes routine, so most people let their guard down and end up leaking their password to a fake site or allowing a malicious application to run on their profile or machine.
With the rise in popularity of the Mac, I'd imagine it's only a matter of time before malware for the Macintosh is developed that will catch the Mac population completely off guard. A cleverly designed keylogging worm could infect a large number of Macintosh machines, and the responsible party would have access to a critical amount of credit card numbers, passwords, personal data... the list goes on.
Pardon me for straying off-topic with that last paragraph, but the possibilities of cyberterrorism these days are endless these days, and social networks only serve as a catalyst for such acts in careless hands.
The addiction is another issue entirely, but users need to understand how to stay safe online, both physically and cybernetically. That should be the main focus of the social networks: not just privacy, but online safety.
But the fact of the matter is, the networks aren't responsible for the actions of the users, only their privacy, so I agree with what you're saying about privacy. But unfortunately control of the addiction to social networking, like the control of any addiction, is completely up to the users.
It sure would help though if the networks at least discouraged users from feeding their addictions.