The course of social networking holded last night remind me of some ideas about Social networks on personal privacy issues.
As we know, the personal privacy is a concept that different from security issues .When it comes to the security issues , it generally means how a hacker gains unauthorized access to the computers of other peoples or organizations. However, Privacy [1]is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively.
More specifically,privacy could falls into different categories: personal privacy, informational privacy, organizational privacy and spiritual & intellectual. And the informational privacy can be divided into several categories. One of them is Internet privacy which mostly occurs on social networks. It is the ability to [2]determine what information one reveals or withholds about oneself over the Internet, who has access to such information, and for what purposes one's information may or may not be used.
Can you image that a single person can cause a large damage through incorrectly relaying an erroneous information(以讹传讹)? That is the unimaginable power of social networks, what’s worse, it would easily ruin a person.
Recently , I have saw a film called ''Search'' which is directed by Kaige Chan. It is a complex story starts in a normal morning when an urban white-collar lady refuse to give her seat to an old man on the bus.And her manner is recorded into video and posted on the internet by a girl. But it completely change the destiny of many people in the end.
The film shows the power of internet which is not only share the basic purpose of online communication and interaction , but also may convey the wrong signal to mislead large number of peoples.
Meanwhile,It bring up an important concept.Human flesh search,so call ''ren rou sou suo'' in Chniese(人肉搜索).It is [3]a literal translation from the Chinese, are internet searches by people for people. In online forums or bulletin boards, netizens search for and share information to identify an individual, their whereabouts, personal and contact details.
[4]
Just as Professor Rosanna says, it is something that people can slove but computer cannot do. It also match the concept of ''Distributed Human Computation'' I have learnt in class on Tuesday .
There are always two sides to everything.To some extend,it can be made good use of helping people ,just like finding lost children and appealling for donations. However, it may make you believe something that is not true by telling you a lie or wrong impression.
With the discussion above,we can soon come to the conclution. On one hand, social network provide a platform for people all over the world to share their own ideas even without exposure of their identity. On the other hand, even though internet that does not openly expose their users’ identities may provide enough information to identify the profile’s owner. At the same time,some confidential information maybe showed on the social network by the insouciance owners. Without doubt, It can be easily exploited by the person with ulterior motives.
So be careful and protect yourself on social network!
References:
[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy)
[2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy)
[3]http://freespeechdebate.com/en/discuss/chinas-human-flesh-search-engines/
[4]YOUTUBE
