Earlier we looked at the strange, and fairly recent, shift in human communication where information could be reproduced, repeated and widely broadcasted. This week, we’re going to look at online privacy.
30% of employers admit to using Facebook alone to vet potential employees. If that weren’t reason enough to think about online privacy, the majority of young people find it socially acceptable to look through someone’s Facebook profile and photos to learn about them before going on a first date and many parents now use online social networking tools as well. I use Facebook as a prime example because it has 350 million active users, half of whom log in at least once per day.
On a website like Facebook, where 2.5 billion photos (and climbing) are uploaded to the site every single month - 30 billion photos every year - how much privacy is left?
Not much, at least according to President Obama. When speaking to a group of high school students last year, he said in response to a question from one student about how to become president one day: “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life,” Obama said. “That’s number one.”
There is something epic happening in our culture when the President of the United States tells young people that the number one thing to remember if you are interested in becoming president is to be careful about content posted online.
Even the way in which people converse on Facebook has seemed to change over the years. Conversations that used to happen either over phone calls, emails, text messages or private messages on Facebook now seem to happen right out in the open for, at the minimum, hundreds of people to see and save for eternity if they so desire.
The way sites like Facebook or Myspace are designed encourage this, as the default means of communication is posting content to the semi-public wall of another user’s page. At what point did personal communication become a public spectacle?
Most Facebook users do not have strict privacy settings and most Twitter users, for example, do not have protected (or private) updates. The mere action of communicating with one another has become a public event for people to comment on, reproduce, or save.
On one hand, this new way of communicating is extremely interactive, to the extent that one can see on who is communicating with whom, can comment on any individual communication or even send it to another friend. This virtual community has an amazing upside - we have literally created new communities where there were non before. You can see what your friend thought of photos uploaded by another friend on the other side of the world.
And not only do people publicly converse about normal things that used to be private by default, but people also tend to share more personal information about themselves online. Again, a double-edged sword - as this creates incredibly engaged, emotional and personal communities online, but also leads many people to put on display things they perhaps ought not, and in the future may wish they hadn’t.
That is one of the downsides, related to what Obama said about online content being saved for eternity. And there is enormous social pressure put on people when their lives are literally on display for anyone to see. Relationships between people often start or end based on what happens on Facebook. Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan may have said it best, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Our ability to recognize this problem, however, is important and I think we can temper the negative side effects and gain more of the positive. As per usual, I don’t think I can fully answer any of these questions or issues here, but it is very important to bring them up and ensure that the implications of some of these new and emerging technologies are taken seriously and discussed.
In the meantime, check out my blog for the 5 Facebook privacy settings you need to ensure you have control over your privacy online.
30% of employers admit to using Facebook alone to vet potential employees. If that weren’t reason enough to think about online privacy, the majority of young people find it socially acceptable to look through someone’s Facebook profile and photos to learn about them before going on a first date and many parents now use online social networking tools as well. I use Facebook as a prime example because it has 350 million active users, half of whom log in at least once per day.
On a website like Facebook, where 2.5 billion photos (and climbing) are uploaded to the site every single month - 30 billion photos every year - how much privacy is left?
Not much, at least according to President Obama. When speaking to a group of high school students last year, he said in response to a question from one student about how to become president one day: “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life,” Obama said. “That’s number one.”
There is something epic happening in our culture when the President of the United States tells young people that the number one thing to remember if you are interested in becoming president is to be careful about content posted online.
Even the way in which people converse on Facebook has seemed to change over the years. Conversations that used to happen either over phone calls, emails, text messages or private messages on Facebook now seem to happen right out in the open for, at the minimum, hundreds of people to see and save for eternity if they so desire.
The way sites like Facebook or Myspace are designed encourage this, as the default means of communication is posting content to the semi-public wall of another user’s page. At what point did personal communication become a public spectacle?
Most Facebook users do not have strict privacy settings and most Twitter users, for example, do not have protected (or private) updates. The mere action of communicating with one another has become a public event for people to comment on, reproduce, or save.
On one hand, this new way of communicating is extremely interactive, to the extent that one can see on who is communicating with whom, can comment on any individual communication or even send it to another friend. This virtual community has an amazing upside - we have literally created new communities where there were non before. You can see what your friend thought of photos uploaded by another friend on the other side of the world.
And not only do people publicly converse about normal things that used to be private by default, but people also tend to share more personal information about themselves online. Again, a double-edged sword - as this creates incredibly engaged, emotional and personal communities online, but also leads many people to put on display things they perhaps ought not, and in the future may wish they hadn’t.
That is one of the downsides, related to what Obama said about online content being saved for eternity. And there is enormous social pressure put on people when their lives are literally on display for anyone to see. Relationships between people often start or end based on what happens on Facebook. Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan may have said it best, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Our ability to recognize this problem, however, is important and I think we can temper the negative side effects and gain more of the positive. As per usual, I don’t think I can fully answer any of these questions or issues here, but it is very important to bring them up and ensure that the implications of some of these new and emerging technologies are taken seriously and discussed.
In the meantime, check out my blog for the 5 Facebook privacy settings you need to ensure you have control over your privacy online.
