Privacy Trainwreck? Hardly.

What is being hailed as Facebook’s “privacy trainwreck” is hardly the hoopla it’s being portrayed as. Privacy seems to be an ongoing problem with Facebook and its users and more often than not, Facebook users blame the website for revealing certain information that they deemed to be private.

I have two issues regarding that argument:

1.) If there is information that a Facebook user doesn’t want to be released, why in the world would that person put that information on a social networking site in the first place? If a user knows that a photo of himself or herself getting drunk at a friend’s party is not a good thing to share publicly, why do they even consider sharing it, even with friends?

2.) Facebook allows users to set certain information about themselves to be private. If those users are unaware of that feature, they need to click on the “Help” link next to the “Home” link on their Facebook home page when they sign in or look up tutorials online. While it’s plausible that some people are so busy with their lives that they are unaware of changes in Facebook until it’s too late, it doesn’t mean that they can blame the company for exposing information that they could have easily set to private.

Of course, deleting one’s Facebook account doesn’t necessarily solve the privacy issue, since it doesn’t just apply to social networking but to the Internet in general. We can’t even look up anything without having a third party tracking down what it is that we’re looking for so they can bombard us with their products or services.

I understand that not everyone who goes on Facebook is Facebook-savvy, so why do they even have one in the first place? It’s like buying a power tool at a hardware store but you don’t know how to use it when you get home. Whatever happened to people learning about how to use things before using them in the first place?

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2 Responses to Privacy Trainwreck? Hardly.

  1. Great post! I completely agree with this, I find that Facebook users tend to post certain things that they themselves don’t want to see but in turn is still post. I feel that Facebook users enjoy exposing something “wild” that they did, to get that attention, but they don’t stop and think about how it could effect them in the interim. I think that in order for people to feel safer on the internet, desperate measures have to be taken.

  2. mbottaro says:

    Very well said. I really like how everything was put like the privacy settings, if people don’t want their info to be seen, don’t put it up there or block it from everyone. It always bothers me when I see pictures of drunk people doing stupid things like it’s not going to come back to get them. So with that said great job.

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