click2engage

One of the blogs I found recently and absolutely love it, asked this question: Is anything private anymore?

I would say that once you enter the world of online communication / sharing and connecting, one should openly and consciously acknowledge that  the online world is a private as the information one chooses to share on this medium.

Despite my age and despite not fitting into the “less tech-savvy” category, I was one of those people who believed that what you put out there (whether in the form of information about yourself, comments on different blogs or forums ) is the ultimate measure of how people will judge and see you (which is why I waited so long to even open a blog). To a certain extent I still believe that (i.e. this comment will instantly generate an impression of me for whoever chooses to read it and they may like it or not), however in this day and age everyone has an opinion about everything and while some may agree with what you’re saying, others will not.

It’s just a fact and users of online tools must learn to accept that as long as they’re online they’ll probably have as much privacy as a fish in a bowl.

On the other hand, privacy is definitely an issue and users cannot be expected to automatically know what to post online and how to protect themselves. An article published  on the irishtimes.com was debating this exact issue:

Presenting a keynote address at the RSA conference in London, People Security’s chief security strategist Hugh Thompson said that while posting on social networks has grown, “there hasn’t been a commensurate education about what information we should be sharing”.

A good example of this lack of education and knowledge among users,  is the photo blogging site launched in February of this year – www.dailybooth.com - which already has approximately 6 million active users.

This new trend of blogging attracted various groups of people specially teenagers that uses pictures to express themselves instead of words. Amazingly, others responds also in their photos as a reply. Though you can also reply in written comments.

The majority of its users are women between 15 and 25 years of age, who posts photos and comments about their daily life in pictures.  Therefore, despite the fire Facebook came under regarding the privacy of the photos users post online that were used without their consent by 3rd parties, users don’t seem to mind posting their webcam photos on dailybooth.com. The issue here is that, although the site does offer users some privacy settings, is it  really educating its users enough in the issues involved in “Documenting and sharing their lives with others”? Or is it expecting users to know what it’s involved?