Social networks allow and encourage users to publish/share details that should remain private. However, social media companies collect such information both in order to personalize their services and sell it to advertisers (Piirsalu para. 2). Marketers use the information about the users’ interests and preferences to target their products and marketing campaigns. This is worsened by the fact that the collecting of such information presents opportunities for criminals to illegally access and employ the data for abusive purpose (Piirsalu para. 5). This article argues that there are privacy problems inherent in the very business model employed by social media websites. The sites are dependent on harvesting user information that is in turn passed over to marketers. Piirsalu (2012) examines three key social media types (social media sharing, location based networks and social networking sites) and the respective threats to privacy that they present.
Consequent to the increased sophistication and power in mining and processing information, the risk of privacy invasion increases considerably across all the seven types of social media sites. Social media sharing sites allow users to generate and share content, which may reveal the their social and physical context, presents new threats to the users’ privacy, not least because lay users are unaware of the risks that they subject themselves. According to Piirsalu (2012), modern digitial communication and other devices such as cameras, mobile phones and computers may publish personally identifying information about the users (including location, time, and phone contacts). Publication of content is not only easy, but it even more heightened by the fact that users “users do not think or are not even aware of the risks when they share something online”. Often, users make decisions to share content on impulse, but once the content goeas live, users lose control over it, because it can be seen, re-shared and/or downloaded by other users, to the detriment of the original sender. The platforms do not warn users, nor are there regulations/rules to protect users as well as other parties that may be depicted in the content, which is why according to Piirsalu (2012), it is urgent to protect “individuals who happen to be the subjects of the content without their own permission.”
In addition, the false belief among social media users that the content they provide is private, also raises a privacy challenge. The false belief causes users to provide private information, when in reality, they have little guarantee that the platforms they use may keep the information as such. Once the users’ content goeas live, the users lose ownership and conteol over the same. The platform they use assumes full rights over the use of the content. Users give up the control over their own information to the respective social network platform. This privacy threat is emphasized by examples of how “private” postings on social media have cost users their jobs. According to Piirsalu (2012), it is common practice, for example, for employers to look up information about prospective employees before they hire them. In one such case, a president of a Chicago-based consulting firm looked up information about a prospective employee, whom he subsequently rejected because of social media posts about obsessive sex, marijuana and shooting people (Piirsalu para. 21).
With regard to the social networking sites, the privacy issues include the fact that users freely volunteer information to sites that have become indispensable to their lives, but the platforms harvest such information for their own gain. Sites such as Facebook have developed archive-oriented personal information repositories, which stores information volunteered by users. Users are often unsuspecting of the intentions of corporations. Specifically, personal information aggregation techniques called “instant personalization” and “connections” lead to users revealing personal preferences and private information without necessarily intending that such information should be public. By clicking on the “Like” button on Facebook for instance, a user is publicly linked to a page or other content. The technology upon which these aggregation techniques are based allows possible personal information leakages, unless users specifically opt out. Accidental leakages of information are also possible as exemplified by an accidental publication of Facebook’s “Home” and “Search” code in August 2007. Similarly, Facebook uses a technology called Beacon, which allows third party sites to make use of personal information given to Facebook, including photo identification. The ease with which sensitive information can be accessed by third parties with Facebook’s permission, as well as by other users, is frightening.
Finally, location based services may be used to tack the users’ whereabouts including by stalkers. These services also use technologies that are vulnerable to data scraping i.e. “the sophisticated trawling and monitoring of user activity in an effort to build a rich database of personal information”. The emergence of applications that aggregate user information such as a Russian-builtn app called Girls Around Me based on the Foursquare platform that accessed Facebook’s user/friend data and passed it on to the user. Further, Piirsalu (2012) raises concern with the default opt-in settings, which exposes unsuspecting users to privacy invasion.
Perhaps even more worryingly, Piirsalu (2012) argues that the convergence of social media platforms, both in the technologies for capturing and using data, as well as because of direct acquisitions among the social media companies. This will see third party companies get access to personal information that was volunteered to other sites. Effectively, the privacy invasion risk is aggregated.
Works Cited
Piirsalu, Kadri-Liis. Privacy issues of Social Networks. 12 Dec 2012. 31 Oct 2014. <http://social-networks-privacy.wikidot.com/>.
