Internet Privacy

2426 Words5 Pages

This essay will discuss the way social networking sites affect the nature and limits of privacy. There are various social networking websites e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, Twitter, Google Buzz, and many others with various privacy settings and in the past several years billions of people have joined these social networking sites.

Social networking sites give their users an easy way to share information about themselves. However, many users are quickly finding that the information they intend to share with their friends can all too easily find its way into the hands of the authorities, strangers, the press, and the public at large. For example, job recruiters are looking to these sites as well as performing more traditional background checks on potential employees. Performing a search using these sites may result in retrieving a substantial amount of personally identifiable information about a person. (epic.org, 2010)

As said in above quote, social networking sites (SNS) give their users an easy way to share information about themselves. However, no one knows including social networking sites (sometime) that who is going to access the information available online about the user. For example, in recent time burglars have been using SNS (e.g. Facebook, twitter etc) to track people’s location and to discover when home owners are on holidays. This kind of problem is making SNS users vulnerable. Nevertheless, the problem does not finish here; it stretches further when users of SNS find that their every movement on SNS is being monitored. A user’s activity on SNS is not only monitored by SNS but also by others e.g. partner. Tokunaga (2010) explains that estimates suggest that people are increasingly using SNSs for engaging in th...

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