Privacy in New Media

Privacy is probably the most crucial concern relating to new media these days, especially social networking websites. The idea that anyone could view your personal information, pictures online is kind of frightening. Humans as social beings like sharing information. However, we also have a tendency of staying on the safe side. We would only give our information to people we trust and hence, the issue of privacy. Initially, websites like MySpace and Orkut had no privacy settings at all which means that any one anywhere in the world could view your profile, pictures and personal information should you put them on the website. Facebook came up with the feature of privacy settings and I believe that made many people flock from Myspace to Facebook.

A few months back, all of us who are on Facebook were prompted to update our privacy settings. Majority of my friends including me ignored it for a week or so until we realized that our entire profiles are publicly visible all this while. It is important that we keep track of these privacy settings if we have any information online. In addition, there were numerous rumors going around saying that Facebook was selling our personal information and photos. Refer to the article below:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10165190-36.html

However, it is a must that we don’t put our home address, phone numbers or any such information that could lead to identity theft. We must be alert and protect and control our online information.