INTRO
Online social networking has become a norm in
today’s flowering technological prowess; socializing teens and corporations
alike take care of their personal and professional business on sites where it
is efficient to digitally connect and communicate effectively—but as the
plethora of social networking sites expand, adding thousands of users daily, a
new issue is becoming more and more debated—could our privacy, to both our
personal and professional information, be at risk? It’s true that because of
the recent and explosive expansion of online socialization that a vast amount
of private information has become available digitally, a click away for the
people that know their way around the internet, but perhaps it isn’t just
strangers and ‘creepers’ that we have to worry about getting our information;
according to one study, today’s online conditions have “made it necessary to
consider the invasion of privacy by corporations” (Barnes 6). Online ad generators that run marketing scams
directly off of massive databanks of information harvested from social network
users, given openly from the network administrators themselves—this has led to
a newly posed question: even if you change your privacy settings so that only
friends can see your information, should online social networks still be
allowed to garner your information to their ad-generating comrades to redirect
it back to you and your friends, and maybe even other people? People generally
share not only photos of themselves, but also their hometown, birthday, e-mail,
phone number, who they are friends with, and even where they are by address at
given intervals of the day, giving a multitude of angles and precedents that
social ad generators could use to their advantage, making it so advertisers “can
co-opt the power of an individual's social network to target advertising and
engage their audience” (Tucker 2). So,
stalking and harassing aside, who is at fault for online privacy infringements,
what are possible resolutions, and who should be responsible for putting them
into practice?
DEFINITION
SocialAd
Ad Generators
Terms of Agreement
Privacy Settings
LITERATURE REVIEW
*83%
of facebook users say it “helps them interact… with friends” (Debatin 93)
*“Only
69% of respondents indicated that they had actually changed their default
privacy settings” (Debatin 93)
*Predicted “Facebook users have a
limited understanding of privacy settings
in social
network services” and, consequently, will probably not even attempt to take
advantage of their privacy settings options (Debatin 93)
*“Social
networking tools have become indespensible for teenagers, who often think their
lives are private as long as their parents are not reading their journals
(Barnes 4)
*Limiting
your privacy settings so that the information you post is “friends-only”, will,
according to one study, exert “audience control over social network site
disclosures” (Stutzman and Kramer-Duffield 2)
*Whether
someone generally goes “friends-only” without being prompted depends on several
factors such as how many friends they have, what their educational setting is,
and their purposes in using Facebook (Stutzman and Kramer-Duffield 6)
*“Due
to the persistent digital nature of Facebook, utterances that would normally go
unrecorded are stored and replicated in the sociotechnical system” (Stutzman
and Kramer-Duffield 8)
*“In
particular, social networks will be able to exploit their considerable inherent
network effects to enlarge their share of advertising dollar (Tucker 24)
*“Social
norms also impact users’ choices to disclose or protect information (Strater
and Lipford 115)
*“Participants
with private profiles reported that they had restricted their profiles due to
previous privacy intrusions on either Facebook or MySpace”, including strangers
obtaining either their phone number or e-mail, and persistently harassing a
user until they had to permanently change their number or e-mail; even though
they changed their privacy settings afterward, a strong indication that there
was something in their power that they could have done to prevent the
intrusion, they still blame the social networks for letting such events happen (Strater
and Lipford 116)
ARGUMENT/ANALYSIS/PROPOSAL
*edit rough draft*
CONCLUSION
*EDIT* If there was this collaborative effort between
stricter, more efficient privacy regulations by the social networking sites and
the distinct awareness and restricted posting and availability of information
on behalf of the users, both by not posting what they don’t want accessed and
by changing their privacy settings to better suit their desires without
infringing on their relationship-cultivating uses of the sites, then perhaps
the endless game of blame-throwing would end and online privacy would no longer
be an issue in an age where tools like networking can be rewarding and
profitable if done correctly.
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