I Week 8, we looked at Social Networking sites. The biggest one that I want to focus on is Facebook. There has been some great banter on the Curtin University Blackboard about what word best describes our experience of Facebook and it's privacy issues. Overall this weeks learning has been quite interesting on how people generally see what Facebook is.
The one word that best describes the facebook experience for me is Connection. As a new mum, it is hard sometimes to get out of the house and connect to other adults. It's been great to reconnect with old friends that i have fell out of touch with over the years, and I can ask me "friends" advice on topics, invite them to events and share photos and videos with them. It is a great tool of communication for me to keep connected with the outside world. (As posted on Blackboard by myself)
Other words that have been discussed are Community, Passive, Evil, Intriguing, Procrastination, and Reconnecting. The general consensus has been that Facebook is a great way to keep connected to family and friends all over the world, but also it can be the tool to invade your personal privacy. But as the old saying goes, buyer beware. don't give all your information out so freely, keep some things private and not posted on a social network for the world to see.
Fellow student Marina Okuneva had a great view on the privacy on social networks. Okuneva quotes;
"Facebook collects private information about its users not because they are evil, but to fulfil its purpose - be a social network (well, and to make some money while doing it of course ;-) ). People open Facebook accounts in order to socialise - to find lost friends(?), share information and communicate. Facebook is pretty clever at helping its users in making connections with each other very easy and straightforward. But there is no magic - in order to connect you with other people Facebook needs to know something about you - and the more it knows the better it works. Users provide their information because they want it." (Curtin University Blackboard, 2011)For our children sake, knowing the dangers of SNs and teaching them what not to do is well worth the lesson. Also please note, when you are applying for jobs, potential employers jump straight onto facebook and look to see if you have a profile, so they suss you out before you even get an interview. If you have pictures of you being drunk or the sort and talking about discriminating things, your chance of employment are extinguished. Just bare that in mind when pictures, videos or status' linked to you are posted online. Always be conscious that the whole world is watching you when you have a profile online. A great case to follow and use as examples are swimmers Stephine Rice and Michael Phelps. Both their names dragged through the mud from photos and videos leaked onto facebook and other SNs.
Privacy on SNs, it is up to the account holder to make sure they are aware of them and be very careful of what information they provide. I have gone to great lengths not to include bits of important information from my profile so my identity can't be stolen. Leaving out important information is one way to protect yourself. Though I do not understand why people will just post information like mobile numbers for all of the FB community to see.
As to Facebook using our information to advertise to us? Well to keep the service free to its users, they use your personal information to sell ad space to make money to keep people employed so they can in turn make sure your personal information can not be jeopardize. But like every thing on the internet, it is open to hackers, but if they didn't have people working for them, problems such as these wouldn't be fixed. So selling your information to keep you safe... its a catch 22. As a business owner I have used FB ads before to target my market. It really is no different to advertising in the offline world.
As you can tell there has been quite a stir on this topic this week and much interaction between fellow students and our ideas on Social Networking.
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