The Importance Of Social Media Privacy

One of the biggest problems we have in society is the ongoing concern of our privacy being compromised when we use the internet. As the world wide web becomes bigger and bigger, further seeing integration with our personal as well as professional lives, social media companies have looked at doing things with the information we put up on their networks. Social media today, as we use it, connects us with a lot of people in many social circles. From friends and family to acquaintances and people from around the world who share the same interests as us. The goal of social media online is to further connect one another in ways we couldn’t imagine not even 20 years ago. With this power connection with one another, there is risk, and it

We can also post things that mean near and dear to us as well, things that are only for us personally, almost like an online diary that we feel that only specific people to us should know at the most. For example, in a study conducted by Maja van der Velden and Khaled El Emam, they explore chronically ill teenage patients’ communication on social media sites and how they manage privacy on those sites. What they found was that the patients use social media like Facebook instead of email to communicate with others, which is not surprising, however, the patients are using Facebook to communicate with nurses to check on medication, as well as a hub for these patients to potentially meet up and make friends. What was found in terms of privacy was that these teens also don’t want to have their condition known from others, and they do seperate what they want to reveal depending on the audience they are communicating to. According to the study, while it’s not a secret, the people they share their diagnosis and treatment, it’s only to their family and best friends, but if the topic of that isn’t being brought up, they do not mention anything about their situation at all. This information being presented by these teenagers, they already formed in

Not to mention, according to a paper by Jose van Dijck, when Facebook was introducing a new interface layout, the layout gave more control to the company over personal data due to “lack the necessary interest in or skills to control their privacy settings the way they want them to.” (Van der Velden & El Emam, 2013, p. 203). There’s a huge concern with this type of activity from a company with its handling of our private information. Especially with the situation with these chronically ill teenagers, even though this information can be presented anonymously, Facebook is using that information those teenagers perceive as private as a way to present ads and content to those teenagers, which they can catch on wondering how Facebook would know what to advertise to