As discussed in the first article, social networking is one area that has seen the need for privacy. Facebook, twitter, google+, orkut are some of the social networking sites where privacy concerns have been raised. In keeping the privacy, the users choose what needs to be made public on their profile, those that remain semipublic and those that are kept completely bounded. Much as people want to make connections, communicate and maintain relationships, they have established limits within which to do so. As of 2012, it is estimated that over 1 billion people actively use Facebook in the world today (Freeman, L.C., 2004). Twitter has also seen the rise in the number of users, with the highest number, of about 200 million people, recorded in the United States. Continental statistics indicate that Europe hosts the highest number of Facebook and twitter users. Close to 1.8 billion people use them globally.
Researches have shown that trust is a factor when it comes to what is kept private and what is made public on social media. It is said that one would be more willing to share certain information about themselves to the people they trust the most. It takes an individual user of a social network to be able to control information flow, and that happens along the lines of perceived trust that exists between the user and the people they relate with on the social network. On the Facebook, we have had situations where friends, personally known to you or not, decides to stalk and spy on you and deactivate their account to avoid being detected or even being blocked by the attacked friend. They take the advantage of the loopholes on the social network sites to make their use increasingly insecure.
There is so much ease of accepting friend requests from people scarcely known to one. Users don’t take their time to investigate the details of the other asking to be friends with them on the social network. This, researches have shown, has led to the most instances of attack and spy behaviors. Once they execute the attack or the spying, they make it hard to know what makes them do it (Rainie, L. & B. Wellman, 2012). Once they block the attacked, you can neither unfriend them or even access their timeline. They reactivate when you least expect and continue the attack or the spying act.
In the third article, it is found that Facebook users accept friend requests from other ambiguous users who are scarcely known to them. People receive friend requests from people with vague profile information and go on accepting them vague as they are. These are often referred to as fictional characters. This has affected privacy the most and contributed to most of the cybercrimes happening on Facebook. There needs to be more technical security measures on the social networking websites to avoid people having fake Facebook and twitter accounts (Estrada, E., 2011).
The government may not need to overly limit people on how they conduct themselves on the social networks, but most reckon that there needs to be a degree of control of how it’s used. I would suggest a regulation that restricts people to use their identity details only once when registering as a user on the social network. Duplication would then be avoided and everybody would go easy on committing cybercrimes for fear of being traced and made to face the law.
References
Estrada, E. (2011). The Structure of Complex Networks: Theory and
Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, L.C. (2004). The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study
in the Sociology of Science. Empirical Press.
Rainie, L. & B. Wellman. (2012). Networked: The New Social Operating
System. MIT Press.
