Privacy in today’s digital age is something that has in many ways gone by the wayside, The development of the new media “savvy” society has saturated the net with social profiles from second life to twitter. The bottom line is that Privacy is at the users personal discretion; it is up to them to be self conscious of who will be reading there social content.
I hope that this does not give the immediate impression that 100% of the wrong should be placed in the lap of the user who posted it. In fact I would argue that nearly all the wrong doing and mal intent is from the public side. My argument rather, is that the user must be conscious and aware of what social implies, the user must become savvy to the policies and programs in place that help protect privacy as well as those that assist in sharing ideas. I agree with some of the ideas discussed on the “Switched” you tube video. “If you point a shot gun mike at a crowd of teenagers in the mall and listen in to there conversation you’re the weird one” , this is very true.
Forgetting predators all together there are many strange instances of privacy invasion on social networks; such as the prospective employer profiling possible employees by what they can see on there myspace or facebook page. This is in no way appropriate or ethical behavior, but it does happen rather frequently. Just because it is unethical behavior does not mean that the user has no responsibility. The user of the social network should only put public information up that he/she does not mind sharing while more personal information should be sent through the more private channels, whether it be from messages from one user to another in there profile inbox or making your “drunken night out” photo album private.
Beyond social media I do believe that there is an intrinsic quality to technological advancement that increases the peoples need for more layers of security an precaution just to keep what’s private; private; Weather it be from the development of the telescope, camera, zoom lens, bar code, national identity networks or social media, the threshold of personal privacy is continually moved back.