Facebook: The Online Soap Opera

What started off back in 2004 as a social networking website for Harvard University students, Facebook has ballooned into an international multi-million dollar success story. Founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg can congratulate himself for becoming one of the newest members of a growing list of men becoming enormously wealthy off the treasures the internet provides. According to Wikipedia, Facebook has a worldwide membership of 34 million (as of July, 2007) and the site, through advertising, has yearly revenues of 50 million (as of 2006).

What Mr. Zuckerberg may not have imagined, or it didn't really concern him at the time, is the privacy concerns that resulted from allowing, in a public arena, a place to inform strangers around the world, or those closer to home, almost everything about a person's life. Zuckerberg has a defensible position if we remember that no one is forced to put their personal information on Facebook. The site allows you to tweak what you allow others to see but the privacy settings are limited. But the company is improving their features concerning security of private information as time passes.

With the ignorance of the general public on privacy issues on the internet, especially those of a younger age, and people's overwhelming embrace of all things technological, it leads this writer to believe we will have, or already do have, pedophiles and criminals scouring Facebook for potential victims. There is a caveat that has spread through the world internet community that needs to be repeated to all Facebook members (or users of any site that allows you to submit personal information). The warning is as follows: Realize that everything that you post onto the internet will stay their forever. Think about that seriously before you decide to put your personal life on the internet. Would you walk up to a perfect stranger on the street and tell them your date of birth, address, telephone number, place of birth, and other information? It is an identity thief's wet dream, not to mention a stalker's paradise.

What your greatest protection, other than not putting this information up on a website in the first place, or using the sites that have the proper privacy options, is being lost in the crowd. With the number of users partaking in social networking websites (Facebook, Myspace, Tagged) you may be safe from the sheer numbers. It's hard to find a target if so many others are gathered in the same space but never impossible. Do you want to take that chance? The answer for most people is a heartily spoken "yeah."

It seems the warnings by this writer and others continue to fall on deaf ears. With the bandwagon mentality of humans in general, it might have been too late right from the start. It seems the world will always be filled with victims. Part of life's learning experience as the saying goes.

Facebook: The Online Soap Opera - Page 2

Article by:
The Ignorant Intellectual

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