One area significantly impacts by social media is
privacy. It used to be that what we did
in our private lives remained private unless we talked to someone about our
activities. Today, however with the
advent of Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, many find is easier and
easier to post tidbits about their daily lives that perhaps, should have
remained private. Bottom line, social
media is dangerous to privacy.
While all this sharing is helping to create communities of
like-minded individuals, it is also destroying their expectation to
privacy. While Susan’s new bikini is
just the thing for the beach at St. Tropez, it may not be something her boss
needs to see. The same is true for
pictures posted on Facebook of friends drinking at a party. Once these images are online, they are online
forever and should circumstances change, say a spouse sues for child custody or
a rival at work is seeking an edge over another employee, these images could
pose significant problems.
One of the big dangers of posting personal information
online is that the internet is crawling with criminals who are just looking for
an opportunity to score. If we post when
we are leaving town or that we have inherited a bit of money, we make ourselves
vulnerable to exploitation. Criminals
are experts at trawling social media sites looking for information about
vacations, nights out, etc., and identifying an easy mark.
What was once the wild west of personal information is
slowly beginning to see some regulation.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is slowly beginning to enforce new
and established privacy policies on social media sites and using these to sue
the transgressors. It has even been able
to force transgressive sites to settle and have included agreement to allow the
FTC a tighter grip on a specific site’s policies.
One of the most notable cases occurred in 2011 when the FTC
accused Facebook of lying to its users.
Facebook allegedly continually told its users that their personal
information would remain private, yet Facebook repeatedly allowed this same
personal information to be shared with the public. Facebook ended up settling this claim and
agreeing to a 20-year consent order.
This agreement mandates that Facebook must first have the consent of the
user before any personal information may be disclosed. What is interesting is that two years later,
the FTC accused Facebook of violating the 20-year consent agreement when it
proposed new privacy policies. FTC said
that Facebook’s intention to use members’ pictures and names in advertising
products included an automatic assumption that parents of teenage users on
Facebook agreed to this, although Facebook had no written confirmation of this
agreement.
These types of victories and restrictions allowed the FTC also
to receive 20-year consent agreements from MySpace, Twitter and Google. In reality, though it is the states that are
leading the way in developing regulations and laws to protect people’s private
information. California, New Jersey,
Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Illinois,
and Michigan have all passed laws specifically restricting an employer’s access
to their employee’s social media sites.
These are all steps in the right direction in controlling access to
private information on social media.
