Social Networking and Privacy

With the sudden popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites, I think our culture is moving towards a trend of oversharing and almost narcissism. We change our statuses constantly, we upload millions of pictures a day, we "check in" to different locations- we want the world to know exactly what we're thinking/eating/reading/doing at this exact moment. While I'm guilty of a lot of these over-sharing habits, it's kind of frightening how little I think about this new trend and loss of privacy. 

I pretty much use Facebook everyday. I use it to keep in touch with a lot of people that are away at other schools and my family, while adding new people that I've recently met as "friends." I try to shorten my Facebook usage by not getting updates though my phone, and I never saw the appeal of Twitter and Foursquare. Even if I wanted to "tweet" or "check into" different places, Facebook has either already morphed a lot of those features onto its own site. Status updates are basically like tweets, and Facebook Places almost replaces the use of Foursquare. I'm still a little creeped out by Facebook Places and Foursquare because I would not want people to know that kind of information. I also doubt there are people that actually care if you just got coffee at Peet's or if you're at Santana Row, unless you have a stalker (which probably makes his/her job a whole lot easier with these sites)

It wasn't until a news article about Facebook's failure of adequate privacy settings that I began to think about what I put out there on Facebook. I used to do a lot of those addicting quizzes, like "Which decade fits your personality best?" until I found out that those quizzes accessed your personal information, even after you were done with the quiz. I also had to go back and figure out what section of my profile, like pictures and videos, I wanted to keep "private." Unless you manually go through every section and pick what you want visible to everyone or limited to friends, you're projecting every aspect of your life to everyone, friend and strangers. It's so easy to forget how public the Internet is, and once you post something it is out in cyberspace forever.

Despite privacy and oversharing issues, I think there are some benefits of this blur of our personal lives and technology. Skype has been a great invention that helps me keep in touch with friends and family while at college. Instead of a faceless conversation on the phone or a quick email, Skype gives you face-to-face contact. Facebook, as said before, helps stay in touch with friends and family that are away through photo albums, status updates, etc. What is going to be difficult is how to distinguish what we keep private and what we put up online. I try to think more critically about what pictures I post on Facebook, and I try to limit how much personal information I list. I've seen way too many of my friends get in trouble for incriminating photos they put online, and I've heard enough horror stories of creepers on the Internet that lurk on girl's profile information. It's going to be hard however to separate what should remain private and what we upload online because the privacy norm is constantly changing.