Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy & Confidentiality are highly related to new media. Whether you are a user or non-user, you are impacted and exposed by the amount of privacy and personal information that is shared through social networks. Even if you do not participate or have an active profile in social sites, many of your friends do and will upload information about your life such as pictures, your interests and other personal information. Thousands of people constantly update the entire virtual world of what they are doing, how they feel, and where they are. Many people see social networks as a place to reconnect with old friends, connect with need ones or simply for entertainment purposes. What most of them ignore is the amount of personal information which they consider "private" is mainly shared and sold to third party companies for advertising and marketing purposes. Moreover, there is a notion of "shadow profiles" these are mainly related to profiles created on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Such profiles are built on unwanted information that users no longer wish to share or display. Things like pictures, comments, likes on pages, etc. Research shows that these profiles do exist and are kept in databases. An good example related to the idea of shadow profiles can be the fact that Facebook for instance, does not give you the option to close your account completely. Instead they provide you the option to "deactivate", with this you can no longer be found, or searched in Facebook. However, where does all your previous information goes? That is something to be aware and concerned about...

Another issue that goes in hand with this topic it is privacy policies. The majority of times social sites will require you to share as much personal information as you can. For example Facebook requires you to set up an account only if you provide a current email, your age and student status. Additionally, private policies are mostly perceived as misleading, unclear and hard to read. Many times people ignore those polices as well as the terms & agreements and simply click on the box to agree to all terms. What they do not know is that by not informing themselves about such policies, they are exposing all their private information and giving up their rights to being violated by social media companies.