Adjust your mindset for social networks
Most of us are pretty decent folk; we don’t go around trying to be malicious or looking for ways to cheat our neighbors. In our day-to-day life we encounter a fairly limited number of people and we tend to assume they are straightforward until proven otherwise. Human society as we know it would be unworkable if we had to regard everybody we met as potential thieves or worse. So we are accustomed to extending a certain amount of trust to others. In some situations- for example, buying a used car- we know we should be wary but ordinarily we give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not out to get us.
Unfortunately, the Internet has no resemblance to the ordinary environment we are used to. The rules are different. Our ordinary life experience doesn’t hold. The Internet exposes us to hundreds of millions of people all at once. Most of them may be just like us but any very large group contains criminals and other sociopaths. It only takes a small percentage of bad actors to make the Internet a place where precautions must be used.
In fact, using the Internet requires a change of mindset. We cannot rely on strangers to be trustworthy. Instead of trusting, we must approach Internet activities with the assumption that what we do can be exploited in undesirable ways. Personally, I am surprised at how careless people are with what they put on social sites. In their minds they are sharing with a few friends and relatives. Actually, they may be revealing personal information and pictures to a lot of strangers in far off countries who will not hesitate to use what is posted for shady purposes. Even if the purposes are not shady, the information may be used in ways that are disagreeable.
Sunday’s New York Times has an article discussing the consequences of posting pictures of your children. It begins with the experience of one mother who put up pictures of her children on Flickr for relatives to see:
Then a friend sent her an e-mail message with the kind of subject line no parent cares to read: “Oh no — it’s Gracie.”
The message contained a link to Orkut, a social networking site popular in Brazil. Someone had created a fake profile, using headshots of Mrs. Gwozdz’s 4-year-old daughter.
“They gave her a fake name, Melodie Cuthbert, and a relationship status that said she was interested in making friends and dating men,” Mrs. Gwozdz recalled in a recent telephone interview. Other Orkut members had given the profile a “sexy” rating of two and a half hearts.
Unless a social site has strict privacy controls, remember that you are not just sharing with friends and relatives. You are providing material for any one of hundreds of millions of people to do with as they wish. And the Internet is a perpetual archive. What’s “cute” today may look very foolish in ten years time. And even privacy controls are no guarantee. So adjust your mindset and think twice about what you post.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.