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Issues With Privacy On Facebook

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When you look at many in the world today, you find they are tied into a Bluetooth, Twittering, or on Facbook interacting with friends and family. Unfortunately, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and many other websites which information can impose upon your privacy by asking for particular info about yourself. Of course, the Facebook website itself is not deliberately intending to harm anyone by asking for such information. It simply must ask certain things from people to offer the extended social networking services it does so well.

Whether or not this is in the best interest of individuals has been highly debated in the last several years. People against this method want additional security measures, but people who own the websites think the personal info is vital to keeping the users satisfied with relevant advertisements.

So many individuals do not realize that a number of websites use what is referred to as IP tracking. With this technology, a person can actually be monitored – EVERY WORD – and someone out there can even tell exactly WHO and WHERE you are! This particular website nobull-ip-tracking.com/9/index.htm, along with plenty more, does just that.

Because legal filings are occurring every day, ways to keep personal rights safe when users are online, and at the same time, not interfere with the users’ rights to decide how much they want to share with these websites have not yet been established. Recently, one particular site under a considerable amount of scrutiny regarding how personal information is managed is Facebook.

The website is constantly reconfiguring space and allowing access to information even on “privacy blocked” participants. Now, Facebook (and many other similar sites) are struggling to keep up with the high demands of their loyal patrons, all while still trying to maintain strict new requirements from the National Trade Commission.

As one of the largest social websites on the Internet, Facebook serves over 500 million users monthly. Because of the number of users, a lot of the changes Facebook initiated were meant to handle the masses and to address the fluctuating legal regulations. Unfortunately, this had led to certain issues with the website that were unforeseeable. Some of these issues were related to a confusing interface, and a news update feature that put personal info into public areas. Most people do not realize that after they enter personal info onto any website, it can be accessed by anyone with the knowledge to do so.

Beacon Advertising, for instance, was a “service” that was specifically engineered to monitor internet searches and the sites they brought up. Then, people on a distribution list would get an email saying something to the effect, “Check out Johny’s favorite site.” A URL would then take you DIRECTLY to the same site that YOU visited! There were plenty of people with Facebook accounts that did NOT particularly think too highly of such information being forwarded automatically to anybody, even friends. Although certain adverse reactions resulted, Facebook has since removed this program.

Facebook, as well as other social network sites, have taken the privacy issue to heart but, ultimately, it is the responsibility of the users to protect against voluntarily divulging personal information that could lead to an invasion of privacy. Online resources and website continually work to come up with new ideas to make our daily social network experiences both SAFER and more ENJOYABLE. In the meantime, remembering that once information is revealed on the web it many find its way around the world should serve as a warning to users to think carefully before submitting anything.

Written by admin

September 7th, 2010 at 8:58 am