Social Web, Connecting Us or Compromising our privacy ?
Introduction
Social Web is a term used for Internet sites which helps people to interact freely, sharing and discussion about each other. These websites help users to communicate with their social circle by sharing pictures, videos, audio and personal words. In social websites, groups and individuals exchange content to engage in person to person communication. Social media has emerged from the days of IRC and BBS chats to today with facebook, linkedin and a lot more. Social media is still in the process on evolving. Major social networks sites are making changes to improve their websites on almost daily basis, Social websites will continue evolving in coming years. Social media is now an integral part of our society. Some social networking websites have user bases much bigger than the population of many countries. Social website makes us feel that we can get social solutions of about every issue. Social websites have many forms as blogs, message boards and forums, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking, virtual worlds, news and tagging, podcast portals, digital storytelling, writing communities and scrapbooking; content, data, video and image sharing, and collective intelligence. There are many well-known social sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, Typepad, Blogger, Wikipedia, LiveJournal, Wikidot, Wetpaint, Del.icio.us, Second Life, Digg, Lulu, Reddit and others.
Impact of social media
Participating in social media circle has become the most common activity for children and youngster of today's world. Some of them use social web extensively and become addicted to it. These websites offer our youth a portal for communication and entertainment. social web networking has grown exponentially in past few years. It is very important that parents should be aware of the social media sites; the nature of social sites is not always healthy for children. Pediatricians should help families to understand social websites and encourage healthy use, urge parents for monitoring their children due to potential problems associated with social web usage as extensive use can include depression, cyber bullying, exposure of inappropriate content and pornography. (Al-Deen & Hendricks, 2011)
Benefits of Social Websites
Social websites are a good way for connecting people to others peoples with similar goals and interests. Social websites give opportunity for students to connect or meet other students, faculty, staff and even alumni. These websites have made "meeting someone in person" as part of past, now Poking is used as new handshake. Peoples feel free to express their feelings on social websites. Social websites have help us in making and renewing friends. Connected with friends and classmates, meeting people is the major benefit of social websites. Social sites offers surveys, event listings and any kind of information that communicates with culture. Social websites is a great mode for being connected to friends, family and community. Many social networking websites offer marketing services to its customers. Whether a user creates a party for an event or pays $5 for 10,000 hits for an ad, Social websites are great way to market for a club, student organization, team, etc. (Barefoot & Szabo, 2009)
Importantly, social websites offers users the opportunity to make a positive self image. The profile option gives users a chance to make their image by writing their best personal qualities.
Social Media Concerns and Criticism
Undoubtedly, social media has become part of mainstream media and its popularity is increased exponentially in last couple of years, it has been encountered with growing criticism and controversy. The leading criticisms appear to fall along a few lines; Security Agencies using social media to look into private life of citizens, Stackers may be the users of social media, child predators may use Social media, thus sites related to Social media raised security and privacy concerns.
Social Media and Security Agencies
It has become now more easy and less costly for security agencies to take information about someone. It takes less time, no need to take data from other agencies, just go to social website account send particular person a request to add or hack his account and you have information of almost all type of daily activities, as users update their status more frequently on social websites. So now for security agencies no need to spy on someone with the help of multiple agents. Social media have made security agencies to work with low beget. Face book is under discussion for its links with CIA from last couple of last years. The situation could be more devastating if any mafia or gang uses social websites to gather information of their targets. (Trottier, 2012)
Social Media Used by Stalkers
Many social media sites including Facebook have come under threat by making them much easier for stalkers to keep the record of their victims or rather to search new sufferers. Some of the users of social media don’t take advantage of privacy settings and expose their complete profiles in public. Making ones profile secured is often an advantage for professionals where they want to avoid connections with unnecessarily unknown people. Personal profiles can be used effectively for hiding some privacy information from display to public. Social networks ensure these settings for privacy available to subscribers to assist prevent predators and stalkers from being allowed to see the updates in profile. Social website do not force subscriber to adopt these privacy settings, so eventually much of the liability falls on the individual subscribers, not networks themselves.
Social Media Used by Child Predators
MySpace social networks are mostly attacked publically, charged of being a platform for child pornographers and molesters, but various other social networks and websites have made some great steps in securing the information and identities of minors operating these sites. Again, this is among those situations where most of the diagnosed problems arise from the users by not making the profiles private or not using the privacy settings effectively. Recently MySpace took a great action to restrict predators from becoming friends with underage teens by demanding to know email address of the person requesting or any other identifier for sending a request of friendship to any minor. They also ask for profiles of teens below sixteen years of age to be private, not letting non-friend visitors to view them. Some Other sites have also taken these steps. Facebook came under these threats due to changes in its privacy settings policy that were expressed much confusingly to successfully grant privileges to Facebook to use any of your stuff, public or private, for their own reasons (like advertising) even later you had deactivated your profile. (Simon, 2010)
When you realize that majority of people share information about all areas of their own lives on internet especially on social media, it’s no doubt many are worried and have concerns about how companies can utilize that information. Social networks including all other sites must quickly respond to subscriber concerns over security and privacy. Information available in an average social media profile, it would be conceivable for hackers to illegally acquire enough information related to a person may cause problems or steal the identity. Security concerns have also cropped up as average people have found their profiles hacked and embarrassing information posted about them on their profile pages.
Precautions of using a social websites
Users must evaluate their postings in social networking account, they should not post any kind of private information, including home address, cell phone number, social plans, class schedule, etc. Do not try to post anything that might embarrass you in future. User should Utilize the Privacy settings on social website to protect their account. you can also adjust privacy settings to control who may have the access to your personal information. User must be sure about any link that he receive in any messages from any friends on social website. User should know that which information should not be share on his social page as it is a common way for hackers to break into other accounts by using option of "Forgot your password?" on the login page. Hackers look for the answers of security questions from your webpage information, such as your home town, birthday, mother's middle name or high school class. The solution is simple that user should make its own security question or in case website does not allow to make new security question then user should remember to not sharing such information that contains answers to his security question.
User should not trust that a message is really from a sender that it shows. As Hackers are able to break into accounts of your friends so in case if you feel that a message is fraudulent and the language used is not is per that person then use any alternate way to contact your friend and find out. When you join any new social network website, website may ask you to enter your email address and password in order to find out your contacts on the network. Such website may use contact information from your email and send email messages to all in your contact list which includes some persons that you have even not sent a single email message. If you click on a link to social website through another website or email, which ask to enter your user name and password, this site could be a fake site and your personal information can be stolen. To avoid this scenario user must Type the address of his social networking website directly into browser.
Identity thieves can create fake profiles to get information from you. User should be selective before accepting someone as a friend. User must choose social network website carefully. User must evaluate website that he plans to use and user must also make sure that he understand the privacy policy. User must assume that everything he share on a social website is permanent and even if user can delete account, hackers can easily save images and videos.
Conclusion
Social websites helps us in many ways. It let us communicate to our love once even they are miles away. Social web have made or friend and social circle much broader. These advantages also brought some implications with them and the most highlighted issue is of user privacy. User profiles are used by hackers, They use such information for multiple purpose. User should be more educated by social websites to secure privacy of their users.
References
Al-Deen, H. S., & Hendricks, J. A. (2011). Social Media: Usage and Impact. Lexington Books.
Barefoot, D., & Szabo, J. L. (2009). Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook. No Starch Press.
Simon, L. (2010). Social Media Dangers: Get Informed-Protect Your Child. Xlibris Corporation.
Trottier, D. (2012). Social Media As Surveillance. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
