Social Networks Usage - Essay Example

Social networking and the pleasure that one derives from being a part of a virtual community might come at a price brought to light. To update your privacy settings or at the very least review the privacy policies of social communities that you are members of is a necessary precaution. This is mainly because although online social networks offer exciting new opportunities for interaction and communication due to their vast membership and easily identifiable data they open up a window of highly personal information revelation behavior of millions of people to friends as well as strangers.

Research reveals that a majority of users of these networks are not particularly concerned for their privacy and this is largely due to their lack of awareness of the actual exposure and visibility of information that they so comfortably publish their data on working profiles that center around key questions regarding a person’s views, current health, and perceptions on various issues. The reader’s willingness to share this information on networks like Facebook is highly dependent on supposedly granular and powerful control of privacy which is in reality very permeable and easily accessible. These varying levels of privacy-related advertising that social networks target by taking into account heterogeneous privacy preferences in the user population, and the temporal dynamics of privacy concerns all fall into the proposed model of the privacy communication game. This brings to our attention the obvious privacy concerns of members of various social networks and the social network’s strategy that attempt to overcome these concerns and optimize interaction within the group.

Privacy policy, a basic legally binding contract between the social network operator and its users, is the only primary source that a prospective user can rely on to give informed consent for data collection as is required by the EU; which makes a posting and access of these documents both technically and linguistically critical. Also, Security Measures such as the use of TLS Encryption and authentication that aims to enforce these privacy concerns are critical for the functioning of these social networks. However, an evaluation of the adoption of policies conforming to enable these measures through a P3P format shows significantly low adoption of the implementation of these policies. The basic infrastructure of these policies exists but the implementation is weak and highly flawed with sites like Facebook consisting of an incorrect policy element name ‘HONK’ crafted specifically to mock P3P displaying browsers. Furthermore, the fact that experimental economics has long suggested that users’ privacy-related decision-making is systematically distorted because of the limited information provided to them which leads them to display private information without really knowing its easy access implications. The incentive here is for social networks to limit privacy salience as part of their privacy communication game to combat aggressive existing competition.

The negative consequences are, besides having a lot of strangers as well as friends know intimate details of your life, health, and daily schedule, the fact that these social networks store vast amounts of detailed information about millions of users. This combined with the fact that their privacy controls are structurally flawed and costs of mining and storing data are declining which makes the information provided on these ostensibly private social networks, effectively, public data. That could interest marketers, employers, and national and foreign security agencies that have incentives and the ability to seek out these confidential details. Read More