Privacy

Let’s be frank, privacy is pretty much nonexistent in new media and social networking sites.  In this time and age, you can find anything online and with the right motivation and training you can get into any site private or not and access any information.  Some people, however, use new media in despicable and unsavory ways. The article, The Conundrum of Visibility: Youth Safety and the Internet, supports this claim, stating that people use new media for cyberbullying, sexual solicitation, and exposure of explicit content and identify theft; which seems to be a popular one.  Not you nor your personal content is safe from bullies who stroll your homepage looking for something to use to take you down emotionally. For a person who overshares on their new media accounts, they can become an easy target. We use new media so much that it is impossible for most people to go a day without it and because of this they may say, tweet, or update their status and accidentally share information not only about themselves but also their loved ones.  You may assume that this information will stay with your group of friends but as we read the article about the Zuckerberg family that may not be true. Once it is ‘out there’ the level of difficulty to get it off the web is extremely high and sometimes impossible because nothing is really gone or deleted if you know where to look.  My advice would be to take a moment if you can to review what you post because it may seem innocent but out there someone is waiting to use that information to their advantage as we saw several times last year with identity theft.