Privacy and confidentiality is a major concern today. With the growth of new media there was an increase of hackers. When an online profile is created we are subject to privacy issues. Most people don't fully understand the dangers of posting every detail of their personal information online. For example a person's Facebook profile can be compromised and used to send out spam. I remember getting a message from someone of my family members asking for money. When I contacted them they said they were on vacation. This I'm sure happens to millions of people and many are duped out of their hard earned dollars.
The more we are online the easier it is for others to gain our personal information. I suggest limiting the amount of information we share. Most sites ask your birthday, you don't have to put the exact date in or you can choose to hide the year. Some people don't use their real names others use only a part of their name. Once something is online it doesn't matter if it was removed in a split second someone out there saw it. I tell everyone to be careful where they check in on Facebook because they can easily become prey to some psycho.
No matter how safe we try to be there will be some site that abuses our right to privacy and confidentiality. We all just want to enjoy being online and connecting with friends and family, we just need to be careful of everything we do online. We need to be aware of what is posted and how it is being used.
I feel that some of these companies shouldn't even have some of the information they seek such as birthdays and addresses. Some of the sites that people sign up for are not trustworthy and can sell that information to people. Also I feel that the fake information is a good way to throw someone off their track if they are trying to find out more about you. I have also seen people that sign in to their accounts at public places and do not even sign out so this is a major problem like what you said of what happened with your family member's story.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not only with the social networking sites themselves, but with third party websites and external apps. A lot of people think their information is safe when they log in to an external site via something safe like Facebook, but as soon as they agree to be re-directed to a third party site, they put themselves at risk.
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