Privacy in Social Media

The use of social media has change a lot of the things on how people go on their daily lives. It certainly has changed the meaning of words, including: “Privacy.” People hesitate to tell people they just know information about themselves, yet they are not afraid to posting as much information as necessary online to show others who they are. I can think of three reasons why people do this. First people are lying about who they are online. Second they think they are not posting anything relevant about themselves or lives. Third, (the one that I think applies the most) is people think they are protected because of the privacy settings and terms social networks offer when signing up.

In the book “Code 2.0” Lawrence Lessing talk about how Google stores all of our information. Searches, documents, emails and about anything you post or did while logon to a Google account.  Lawrence says is just how Google’s architecture works: they do what they to keep as much data as they can for an endless of purposes. He writes, “If you ever get involved in a lawsuit, the first question of the lawyer from the other side should be-do you have a Gmail account? Because, if you do, your life sits open for review.” This quote sort of applies to social media as well. Anyone that goes into court will more than likely to be subject of getting their accounts on social networks examine in every single detail and it may be even use in against you. As ironic as it sounds, the film “The Social Network” shows how something Mark Zuckerberg wrote on a blog of his, even before he launched Facebook, could have been used against of him, if he had decided to go to trial and not settle in one of lawsuits filed against him. When I was an intern at channel 7 back in El Paso, I remember there was a big story involving a teenager in an accident. Since she was underage it was becoming really hard for the reports to get details about this girl’s life. The first thing my supervisor said to me was to login into my Facebook, MySpace or whatever I had and search for the girl on the networking sites. For so many stories now, reporters rely on Social Media, whether other sources fail or not to provide information about their subjects.

Most users of Facebook, twitter, or anything similar to it, believe that by changing the account setting into private and only allowing users you approve to have access to what you post actually gives you “privacy.” The truth it doesn’t. Once you post something in any of these profiles, private or not, anyone that really wants to retrieve this information would do it with or without your permission. Not everyone has allowed the Library of Congress to follow them on twitter. Yet they are now archiving all of our tweets. Is irrelevant how private and secure you think you have your account, it does not matter if you delete your account. The Library of Congress would forever hold what you tweet it once upon a time. If this does not change what most people think of “privacy” I do not know what does.  

“Code 2.0” talks about the how there is no way for you to know if companies on the internet are cooperating with each other to collect data about users behavior/interests online. Lawrence explains not because you deny your information to a specific website does not mean that website cannot acquire it from the website you trusted. Companies do not necessarly share this information to hurt users, but is vital information that can help them regenerate profit. Lawrence explains that one of the reasons Google stores all of its users data has to do with advertising. Google can see what you do when you are logon onto your account, hence they can decide what advertisement to show on your page. At the end of the day, it almost seems that part of our privacy has been removed in exchange of money. Whatever the reason is, does it justifies it?

I understand that the internet only gives us so much privacy. We all have heard the sayings about “once its online is there forever” or the jokes about “you want to know what happen, go on Facebook.” Everyone is aware that even if social networking sites gave you all the privacy in the world, you never know the intentions of other people and they might just hack into accounts for the fun of it or to actually use that information against you. It was just a couple weeks back that I received emails from my banks that there had been a system breach at one of the companies that does marketing for them and that if they obtained information about me it was only going to be my name and email. No direct account numbers should have been released. There was no harm done, but some stranger can have my email and name and you never know what they can do with that much information. Especially in cyberspace you do not need much detail about anyone to find tons of information about them. Either societies understanding of “privacy” changes or the way the internet works get restructured or the government makes better laws instead of preserving all the twitter accounts. Meanwhile, like Lawrence wrote, just remember: “Everywhere you go on the Internet, the fact that IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx went there is recorded.”