Blog 9 (extra): Social Networking Security

Freestyle: Reading about online privacy concerning social networking.

Being a child of the computer age, I grew up on the internet and grew up learning how to use the internet. The first social networking site I ever really used religiously was MySpace. I was in 8th grade when I created my MySpace account. It took a little getting used to but I found myself connecting more with friends on the internet verses in other forms. When I was elementary school (around 5/6th grade) I talked on the phone with my friends, we gossiped about which guys we thought were cute but we would do this on the phone after school. When I got into middle school we would message each other or comment on each other pages as a way of contacting each other. When I first created my MySpace page I found myself wanting to put information down that was fun, every one of my friends did the same thing. We were all 100 years old and from towns across the world, there were points when i lived in Italy then Egypt even though I really never lived there. An event did occur when I was in 9th grade, a cute boy at school was adding some of the girls at the school. This boy would message the girls and talk to them and eventually get their numbers and start texting them. Little did the girls at the school know this boy was in his mid forties and talking to many girls. The girls at my school lucked out and the man was caught before anyone was hurt but it was still a very scary event. This made me think twice about what I put on the internet and who I talked to. Being shy this wasn't hard I tended to only accept friend requests from people that I know outside of Facebook.

Security has always been a large priority and being in the age group that they surveyed in Raynes-Goldie Essay I was not shocked by that at all. "They found that despite the fact that Facebook users shared personal information, students ranked privacy policy as a very important public issue — even more important than terrorist threats." Personally I don't want people that I don't know to have access to my personal information, earlier this year I also had a identity scare. The company that my work sent my tax information to was hacked and my social security number was potentially leaked. Having this problem I wanted to make sure that I kept all of my information to myself, because of my information leak i had to be careful about identity theft and in our world today that can ruin a person. Having information on Facebook and other social networking sites is like leaving your identity out for anyone to use. I mean the show Catfish is a perfect example of what people can do with just a couple of your pictures. Catfish is an action of using someone else's pictures and talking to people on the internet using a fake profile. Most of the time these online relationships form and people are hurt no one knows why people do it, sometimes out of pain, or revenge, or possibly for personal enjoyment. These privacy problems all form over social networking sites.