Online Privacy and Social Networks

Creepy is an unusual description for a business agreement, yet an online privacy watchdog used creepy to describe Twitter’s decision to allow a company access to Tweetsdating back to January 2010.  The company will mine about 250 million Tweets daily by its own estimate for information and sell the data to businesses for their marketing campaigns.  Old tweets that many believe will remain in the archives or disappear completely will now return in the form of advertising campaigns to haunt their authors.  Twitter has some company in its misery.

German authorities rapped Facebook in 2011 for the social network’s facial recognition software that automatically tags photos uploaded to the site, although users can disable the automatic tagging feature.  Facebook claims that the program is a godsend to users who upload entire albums at a time with scores of friends to tag, but Internet rights advocates and fans of spy films believe otherwise.  Facebook’s use of user data and increasing public access to the profiles of its 845 million users are also noxious stimulants to privacy activists.

Online privacy advocates saw a red flag in the re-sharing option of Google Plus that enables content shared within a user’s inner circle to spread beyond his close friends.  Activists saw another red flag in Google’s plan to link its social network to its other services that can expose the identities of users who are using pseudonyms in Gmail, YouTube, and other Google services.  The plan will unmask JohnnyD’Hunk on YouTube as a skinny man.  Google has also wrestled with US attorneys general over its new privacy policy that combines user information from its different services into one.

With about one in sixpeople owning a social network account, the temptation and pressure to join an online social network are overwhelming and the opportunities to disclose much more than a user’s real name, date of birth, and gender that he provided upon registration too numerous.

By requiring users to reveal personal information upon registration, teasing people to broadcast even their breakfasts to the world, and through corporate and computer software ingenuity, online social networking gnaws at a person’s privacy until what is left of the curtain that blinds the world to a man’s secrets is a diaphanous veil.

-Prospero Pulma Jr.