Social Media has become rampant in the world of marketing. Whenever you pick up a cereal box, look on television, drive by a billboard, you will normally see a hashtag or a logo showing the company has Facebook, twitter or an Instagram. Social media is one of the biggest reasons why some people log on to the internet besides checking their emails.
Seeing how addictive this new concept is, we need to look at some the downfalls of the concept, one of them being our privacy. Facebook, is one of the social medias that we know of that is CONSTANTLY changes. As soon as we get used to an update, Facebook decides to throw another one our way. This goes with Facebook trying to keep it's site constantly new and to keep users wanting to stay with the website.
One thing that Facebook seems to always seem to have a problem with is maintaining the privacy of it's users. Currently, if you have logged on to Facebook lately and you are going through pictures to tag, you will see that Facebook already offers suggestions to some people. I saw this recently when going through my photos. See the image below:
In August, Facebook said they might be adding our pictures to a facial recognition software to tag people easily with suggestions being made from Facebook. The downside to this is the fact that this information can be accessed by the government if need be. This makes me wonder, how private is my profile? I might have it to the ultimate privacy, with images blocked only to me, random people cannot request me, the whole nine. All someone needs to do to find me, is access that software Facebook wants to add us too, and they can easily locate me by the backgrounds in my photo.
If you ever noticed certain ads showing on the side of your Facebook, nine times out of ten, they are things that are relevant to you. For me, the ads I see deal with greek apparel, red sox apparel and things I normally look at on a daily basis. How is it that those ads get to be there? When we are on google or surf the web on things we do on a daily basis, cookies are collected onto our data. It collects data on what sites we visit, what items we purchase, things that fit us into a category. Pages like FB use that data and put ads on our FB newsfeeds that relate to us to optimize the marketing of that specific business. This is good from a marketing standpoint, but what about our privacy? Seeing the changes on FB and their privacy rules makes me feel that they cater more to marketers than they do to their users in regards to their privacy.
Great post Natalie! It was super insightful! I did a post about facebook a few weeks ago and it is appalling what social media is doing with our information. It would be naive to say that they are doing it for our benefit when in reality they are leaking our information to third parties for their benefit. Your post actually has made me a bit more conscious of my postings. Since I am not a Miami native, I constantly post pictures for my family back home to see, but now realizing that not just my social media friends can see that, but anyone who accesses the software, scares me. What are we to do in a world where if we deny social media we are considered an outcast and if we are constantly posting, we are taken advantage of.
ReplyDeleteI think you made some very important points! Facebook privacy settings like you said, can be set to the most private settings but my information will never be completely safe. With this new face recognition software even the pictures I don't tag myself in, facebook still knows that the picture is of me. If facebook has this information then my privacy is already compromised. Some one could get my pictures or information by hacking the facebook server, or a glitch could make pictures of my visable to other users. When we think about just how much personal information we have on facebook it is scary to think that if some one were to gain access they could do whatever they wanted with this information. If facebook sells information to advertisers, why not sell to potential employers? This could be very scary for potential hires who are unaware their facebook is being watched. We must be very careful with the information and pictures we let get posted on facebook.
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