Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy and confidentiality are often the first critiques pundits use when debating social media sites.  The internet is a scary place and with the recent celebrity phone hacking, there has never been more attention on privacy not just within social media but across the internet.  Each new social media service generally now offers users extremely customizable settings that fit the user’s own criteria for privacy and confidentiality.  On my Facebook account for example, I have it set up so that only my friends can view my photos.  I’m old-fashioned in the sense that I believe less is more when it comes to my usage of social media.  I don’t put out anything private, I don’t have any remotely scandalous photos but at the same time, I think what is considered “scandalous” has become an incredibly grey area.  Another interesting aspect to privacy and confidentiality are in the new social media “dating” applications such as Tinder or Hinge.  Both of which try to connect you to people who both parties want to match with and then are able to converse through a proprietary messaging platform within the application.  As the user’s populations for these applications swell, so do the complaints of harassment, often of sexual nature.  Social media is a dangerous world and one must take every precaution in order to maintain their privacy when it seems so vulnerable in this tech age