Blogging and Privacy - Essay Example

Ellen Simonetti (2004), a Delta Air Lines flight attendant, for example, was fired after she posted some problematic photos of herself in uniform on her blog. Simonetti might want to show her blogger friends her daily life as a flight attendant through those pictures, but unfortunately, her pictures became a reason for losing her job. In general, visiting Simonetti's blog and looking up her pictures are exactly what most bloggers usually do. Yet, if someone would report her pictures to somebody without her permission, and so Simonetti might lose her job, this is certainly a violation of her privacy.

If so, in what ways might Simonetti protect her personal information and privacy Regardless of any possible personal security issue, the number of blogs is still steadily increasing, and the purposes of using blogs is becoming more diversified from one blog to another blog. Hence, taking such diversity into account, bloggers must carefully consider the level of disclosure of personal information based on the content posted and the targeted audience. The rest of this analytic argumentative paper is organized as following.

In the first two sections, two opposite tendencies of current bloggers towards their personal information, such as disclosing versus anonymity or hiding, are discussed with benefits and disadvantages. Then, in the next paragraph, it suggested way to efficiently manage such personal information problem in blogging will be addressed. Lastly, another helpful suggestion is explained while concluding this essay.Most of the bloggers reveal their personal information about themselves on blogs. Especially, young generation has a propensity to disclose their personal information.

According to a research conducted by David A. Huffaker, Ph.D. student at Northwestern University, and Sandra L. Calvert, professor of Psychology at Georgetown University," Many teen bloggers expose their first name (70%), age (67%), and contact information (61%) as an email address" (2005, para.10).The reason why teen bloggers reveal such personal information often seems unintentional. This is just because their purpose of maintaining blogs is often to establish a close relationship with other bloggers.

By sharing such type of personal information given above, the teen bloggers match the age groups that they want, and keep in touch with each other outside the blogs, too. From this point of view, blogs are an extension of the real world to teenagers in which they make more friends and share a matter of daily life.In addition to disclosing personal information, however, they also post diaries and photos which altogether have a chance of causing a security problem as which happened to Simonetti, a fired stewardess mentioned above.

In regard to this issue, Mr. Henry G. Rhone, a vice provost at Virginia Commonwealth University, asserted that "[teen bloggers] have never had any problems with [their personal information and contents on their blogs], so they just assume that when they're online, they're safe" (quoted in Read, 2006, para. 17). As Mr. Rhone pointed out, Simonetti's case is rarely happened phenomenon for bloggers to realize its