Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Should we really trust Facebook?
Voyeurism is an interesting topic to discuss when thinking about social networking sites and how I actively participate in them. After reading the article "Myspace Bug Leaks 'Private' Teen Photos to Voyeurs" by Kevin Pouslen, I was appalled to learn that such a situation was happening. I do not have a myspace account, but I do have an account with facebook, and immediately after reading it I went to check my privacy settings. I reassured myself that my entire profile was set to private and the only people that could see anything were people whom I was already friends with. Then I got to thinking, who am I to trust facebook? How do I know that facebook promises me that the privacy settings which I chose will be honored? This made me feel extremely alarmed, I absolutely do not want some online voyeur looking through my pictures. As of right now I am not sure of any precautions I can take other than to be extremely careful about what I post online, other than that my only other option would be to completely deactivate my account. Another student in our class wrote in his blog that he de-activates his account when he is not using it so that people can not see that he even has a facebook (alittlelate4lenny.blogspot.com). I guess that this would be an option, but I don't see the point of even having an account if I am not going to use it to interact with my friends...I mean I would feel like a creep if I only activated my account to look and see what other people are doing.
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Personally, I am not very worried about online voyeurs looking at my Facebook. As strange as it sounds I fell like as a 20 year old I'm a little too old for the teen-loving MySpace pedophile types. Nonetheless, I do wonder how much of what we feel is private on Facebook actually is only seen by our "friends".
ReplyDeletethe thing is I want to slowly move away from having multiple sns's because its too much toil. I basically stick to twitter and occasionally update my fb with something random as a status, just to keep my page alive. Its pointless, on the other hand fb has advantages of photo albums that twiter doesnt. Its not like i activate my account with the sole purpose to see other peoples page, I use facebook in the basic sense that everyone uses it. I personally dont feel like adding more photos of myself. But i definatley see your point, ive only deactivated and reactivated it once, its off now, and i dont plan on bringing it back.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that bothers me the most is when you get an app on Facebook and most people, without even thinking about it, just accept the button where it asks you for permission to access your photos, your friend information, your profile information, etc. I'm not quite positive but I think that those apps are not directly owned by Facebook so we are disclosing our information to this random third party which we have no idea about their credibility. Creepy.
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