Trust = The Best Social Networking Policy?

Social networking has become part of our daily life. People used to connect with their friends through it, instead of phones or mails. It is not surprising when Facebook and Twitter hit their user capacity in the recent years. It is obvious that people want to be heard and seen, no matter teenagers, adults, parents, or elder people.

However, the larger the user of the social networking, the larger it gets for others to read their personal information easily. There is when the social networking finds its fall. David Hobson wrote in the Press Distribution that privacy is the major downfalls in the social networking. For instance, in Facebook, the user gets to fill all his/ her personal information from address, age, birthday, until personal interest. This privacy issue has its proved. Couple months back in Indonesia, a high school girl reported missing after she arranged some meeting with a guy she met in Facebook.

Some studies also show that Facebook gets negative feedback recently. Because of that reason, Facebook change their privacy setting last December that will not captured questions about location-based services (Kang, 2010). Ever since then, the privacy gets better and 50 percent of its user pinched their profile settings into more private setting. Instead of losing its user, on the other hand, Facebook increases in its user members.

Since the case of Facebook (and also Google), the FTC become more concern about the social networking privacy and take it into account more aggresively. Even though people loves being heard or seen by other people, but some privacy would be even nicer!

References:

Hobson, D 2010, The Fall of Some Social Networking Sites, Press Distribution, June 11, 2010, viewed on June 15, 2010 http://www.pressdistribution.net/10217/the-fall-of-some-social-networking-sites

Kang, C 2010, is Internet Privacy Dead? No, just some more completed: researchers, Washington Post, March 15, 2010