The Age of Openness

With my generations fixation with online profiles, blogging, photo sharing and email, has our obsession with broadcasting ones self to the world resulted in a loss of respect for the privacy of others, as well as own? 

A status written by someone can often reveal some quite personal information. In reality, who really thinks about who is going to read the status when it is written.

I for one certainly forget that out of my 450 friends, I actually only talk to about 80 of them and when I write a status I only ever think about them reading it, not some boy from my primary schools sister who now lives in another country.

From the ‘limited’ Facebook profile of mine the minimum a stranger can find out is: my date of birth; what university I am at; where I am currently living; who I’m in a relationship with and my current profile picture. This amount information may seem normal but as a member of Facebook it is the minimal amount of information you can reveal. I can’t chose to reveal any less information which I personally find quite worrying.

Mark Zukerberg (for those of you who haven't seen 'the social network' he is the mastermind behind Facebook) stated that "openness is the new social norm".

This all sounds well and good and I’m sure it would put many a persons mind at ease with the thought ‘well if everyone is doing it…’ But that flippant attitude is with regard to what we know we are revealing.

Facebook as a company can access your information, which is quite obvious due to the fact you entering it onto their site. But many are unaware that if you fail to tick or untick certain boxes, which are hidden amongst a load of technical and notoriously complicated legal jargon, your information can be passed on to other sites and organisations.
Facebook cleverly changes its privacy settings regularly so that unless you chose to customize them, you will automatically be given the default settings which are convenient to them. The smart part of this is that this information will pop up when you log onto Facebook, and the majority of people simply cannot be bothered to spend the time changing these settings. People are therefore unknowingly giving away personal information and unwillingly loosing their privacy.