Privacy & Confidentiality

Social new media make teenagers’ ability to communicate with people in real life deteriorated. At the same time, they expose teenagers’ privacy. For example, data show Facebook's privacy options put teenagers at risk. According to the radio podcast at Sophos, ninety three percent of Facebook users prefer its privacy options to be opt-in rather than opt-out. Forty six percent of the users accepted strangers’ friend requests. Eight nine percent of the users in their twenties posted their full birthday. Almost a hundred percent of the users posted their email addresses. Those kinds of settings put Facebook users in a position that will easily expose their identities. Anyone can easily be friends with others via Facebook and know them more by the information posted on Facebook. The information sharing in social networking is all public. In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009, “Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male” (Lohr P. A1). With this powerful data mining, there is no privacy on social networking sites. Once teenagers’ privacy is at risk, their safety is at risk as well. Offenders can easily use this technique to get closer to teenage users, and the teenagers’ safety is in danger because of the exposed information on social networking sites.