Is Internet Privacy Dead?

With the emergence of social networking powerhouses Facebook and Twitter, one has to ponder about the safety of the information each user posts about themselves. With 10 billion tweets sent on Twitter and approximately 400 million people registered on Facebook, internet privacy and information security has come into the spotlight as more and more users realize how easily available their personal information is on the internet. One only has to type in their name on a search engine and voila, everything from your employers to marital status to what you had for breakfast is known to the world. In the article entitled ‘Is Internet privacy dead? No, just more complicated: researchers’ published on The Washington Post an insight of how sensitive the balance is between privacy and publicity is shown. Apparently it seems Facebook and Twitter are only the tip of the iceberg with more and more players joining the fray such as Google Buzz and MySpace having a rather large amount of users as well.

Interestingly, much of these privacy issues are caused by the users themselves not doing anything about it. They expect their privacy settings to be automated and hence do not really change the settings available on their social networking pages. According to Kirkpatrick (2010), Facebook adopted these default public settings as they are the norms that are socially acceptable. However, Facebook has since taken the step in reminding its users of the privacy settings available on its website. The reminder pops us immediately when the user logs into the website as seen in the image below. Some problems with privacy previously were related to the photo viewing capabilities of Facebook. Pictures that your friends have tagged you in can be viewed by other people that appear in the picture as well even though it has actually been privatized. This shows that the corresponding author has no approval rights on Facebook to actually disallow other people to view the tagged pictures (Coats 2008).



Facebook has taken the logical first step to ensure the safety and privacy of its users. What remains to be seen is how other social networking sites react to this issue as well because easily obtainable information leads to cybercrime such as identity theft and phishing that is becoming more and more evident these days. Internet privacy is a serious matter and should not be taken lightly.


Reference list

Coats, A, J, S, 2009, 'Ethical authorship and publishing', International Journal of Cardiology, No. 131, pp. 149-150

Kang, C 2009, Is Internet privacy dead? No, just more complicated: researchers, The Washington Post, viewed 10th June 2010

Kirkpatrick, M 2010a, Facebook’s Zuckerberg says the age of privacy is over, ReadWriteWeb, viewed 10th June 2010