Where do we draw the line between public and private? As we attempt to perpetuate an increasingly visible presence within our social circles (digital or otherwise), likewise are we are becoming increasingly concerned with the issue of privacy. Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter allow users to connect with friends and share anything from what’s happening at the current moment (via text or photo) to links to other web pages they find interesting. However, how much control do we have over who actually sees the things we are sharing?
Madden points out an increasing trend in users of SNS changing their privacy settings to allow only ‘friends’ to view posts. Not surprisingly, women surpass men in private profiles by nearly 20%. One might assume this correlates with the increasing threat of internet stalkers and the rising fear that someone unknown might learn more than you would be comfortable disclosing. Women usually tend to be the victims of these stories, resulting in an increased concern for internet privacy amongst women rather than men.
However, this raises the question of how public the internet is. When we post something to a SNS, we do so with the assumption that only our friends or followers are ever going to see it. In reality, privacy is a much murkier situation than that. What’s keeping one of your friends from taking a screenshot of a more sensitive post and uploading it to Reddit for everyone to ogle or laugh at? The obvious answer would be to simply not share such information in the first place, but, in an age when an increasing number of personal interactions are occurring over the web, should we not be able to feel comfortable sharing ‘personal’ information with our ‘friends’?
The simple fact is this; when it comes to the internet there is no such thing as absolute privacy. Where the difference between a public audience and complete isolation is abundantly obvious, the privacy scale is infinite different shades of grey. While we can control certain interactions on certain sites, once a user submits something to the world wide web, they have left a traceable artifact which can be dug up and shared with any number of individuals outside of those for whom the content was originally intended. This fact becomes quite amusing when one considers the typical response to the question of “Overall, how difficult is it to manage the privacy controls of your profile?” is “Not difficult at all.”
This may be a scary thought, but these are consequences that come with navigating a digital territory. While nobody is essentially at risk outright, the potential for malicious activity is limitless. Things like automatic location identification and facial tagging are only adding to people’s concern, leaving them unsure if they are accidentally leaving geotag bread-crumb trail of everywhere they’ve been and whom with. As Madden mentions himself, there is an increasing trend amongst SNS users to delete tags of themselves within photos containing compromising material. While it should be noted that Facebook and Imgur claim to “wipe location-identifying metadata” from the image files that users upload to these sites, this will not protect users from photos containing sensitive or compromising material of themselves. How does this apply to the phenomena of ‘drunken party photos’ and the concept of public versus private spaces? Should someone be able to enjoy a party without concern for easily misinterpreted photos being unsuspectedly taken of them? Or did they forfeit that privilege by deciding to show up the party? These are just some of the many complex questions that internet privacy raises. The notion that digital artifacts can be shared instantly and can be accessed essentially forever casts them in a very different light from the sharing of physical artifacts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G1-fpHSYXU A FOX Business news report on the security issues surrounding internet privacy and reputation management.
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