COM 305 Online Privacy

When it comes to your privacy online, very few people actually knows what that entails. Internet users wonder how their information gets online even though they have set their information on private. Even though your profile is set to private, like most believe it is, we have no idea that people still have the power to access the information they want.

So lets bring up the topic of Facebook. Most people are aware of the ability to put your Facebook profile on private, where only those who are your friends that you accept will be able to see what we post to that profile.... so we think.

Most people when signing up for Facebook or any other social media platform, do not actually read the privacy agreement that we have to "check" in order to create the profiles to begin with. Little do we know, employers can actually access our profile even though we set them to private. These employers have the technology and tools to access our information.... So that picture of you raging at a party isn't so private after all.

Users of these platforms are frustrated with the fact that their information is still available even with the private setting. But users must be aware that they are putting their own information on the internet, and they must assume that all of the information is public. If you don't want the public to know your "Private" don't post it at all. It is a risk at all times when the information is posted!

According to Alex Masters article on The Independent Online, he believes that the Facebook Privacy agreement is a hoax . 

"The best course of action when using social networks is to assume that everything you do online is public. At the end of the day, don’t post information on the web if you do not want others - including law enforcement, your boss and your technophobe mom - to see it. Who knows what will happen to Facebook in the future and where their archive of private information could end up. Servers can be hacked, making private information available to anyone if it is leaked into the public domain. And what if sites like Facebook shut down? Unlikely as it might seem, anything is possible. What happens to your private data then?"

And what about those ads that show up on the side of your Facebook feed. How do they know those ads apply to you? They have access to what you post about, if you tweet about football, an ad about football pops up on the ad feed along side your time line. This is how they try to appeal to you. So in reality we can say that no matter how private we think our information is, there is clear evidence that our information isn't really as private as we think.

If you don't want the information to reach the public mainstream, don't post it at all!