Reading and Activity #5

Nicole Abbondanza

I generally value my privacy, but I don’t do too much to protect it. On Facebook, I don’t really post anything that I’m worried about prospective employers or anyone else seeing. I barely post anything at all unless it is just simple things. I never tag my location in posts, for my safety and to avoid potential robberies, like the article “Facebook and Your Privacy” mentions. I also don’t believe that I actually list what town I live in; although the fact that I go to UNCW can be a good indicator of where I live. I don’t believe it is necessary for Facebook and other social media websites to hold as much private information about their users as they do. I understand the use of “likes”: they pretty much give companies an idea of the kind of things consumers would be interested in purchasing from them. I also learned recently that there are no security or privacy settings that one can use to keep others from knowing every movement they make on Facebook; from comments they make on other friends’ walls, to “liking” Facebook pages. The only way around this is to place the cursor over a friend’s picture, highlight the “Friends” status, click on “settings”, and uncheck each specific form of activity that can be seen by others.

I find that the idea of a person “liking” a page about health conditions being used against him or her by their insurance companies ridiculous. It is possible that they support a cause or a relative could be suffering from that condition. I also find it incredibly important for people to be strict with their privacy settings. I personally do not allow most apps to access my information and I set my profile to only be searched for or viewed by friends. Despite this, the knowledge that third parties through friends’ pages could still access my information scares me.

I don’t believe that people younger than high school age should be able to use social media sites. I didn’t use any until I started a MySpace when I was 14, and even then all I did on it was change my layout constantly. I don’t make a point to communicate with people that I haven’t met before. Through posts by outraged tumblr users, I’ve seen twitter pages of girls that are 13 posting half-naked pictures of themselves and making derogatory comments about people that are not of their race. Parents seriously need to be monitoring what their kids are doing on the Internet.

I like the idea of viral job listings. It is sometimes difficult to find open positions at certain establishments, especially those that aren’t customer service related. On another note, the hackings of the accounts of Kevin Jolly and Mark Zuckerberg’s profiles scares me as well. I do recall a time when I didn’t use a very specific password and I received a notification of an attempted hacking of my Facebook page. I immediately changed my password to something much more complex and hopefully I won’t have any more trouble. I hope that someday, the privacy of social media users will be even more tightly regulated than they are now.