Facebook & MySpace users: Take Note!

by azer | March 18, 2008 at 11:03 am

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Many of us, over the past couple of weeks, have been somewhat surprised by the media handling of the Spitzer incident. Part of the trouble came from misleading headlines designed to titilate. Part of the trouble was the overt disregard for the personal privacy and copy rights of a private person who has not been charged with a crime.

Fortunately, it seems that the matter is being taken seriously by at least a few media organizations:

In the past, the media would have turned to family or friends to find personal photos of people who suddenly find themselves in the headlines.

The growth of social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook has made it much easier to get hold of this material. Since it is digital, it is easy to copy and replicate across the web. And it all gets indexed and cached by Google, making it easy to find.

The way the media feeds on the personal material on social media sites raises questions about what can be considered public or private in an Internet age.

This is not the first time that users of Social Networking sites have been confronted by these issues. There have been some minor indications that young people are starting to feel the pinch:

After the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, many students were upset by the way reporters trawled social networking sites for people affected by the tragedy. The students thought of these spaces as private and were critical of the practice of digital door-stepping by reporters.

While the Spitzer incident has brought all these matters to the attention of the general public, those of us who use these services are confronted with these issues quite often. I use Facebook myself. Over the past few months I've sent a couple of personal messages to young people that I care about - so far apparently to no effect.

The funny thing is that you don't need to make much effort to organize your Facebook account. It's easy to greatly restrict access to your personal information. I'm sure the same must be true of My Space and Bebo.

Why don't more people take the time to do so? My guess is that they just haven't thought about it. They simply just haven't gotten around, yet, to clicking on the Privacy link at the top right corner of their Facebook account just to see what's there.

Hopefully the Spitzer incident will trigger a more thoughtful behavior.

Based on a number of incidents over the past few months, I've posted an article to MontrealFamily.net that tries to list some of the issues to consider: