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Facebook and Twitter users 'invite violation of their privacy'
Alistair Foster7 Jan 2010
Users of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are undermining their own right to privacy, scientists warn today.
Online "exhibitionists" who bare their personal lives to the world are unwittingly inviting authorities and employers to put new media under ever-closer surveillance, they said. The sharing of intimate details and photos on websites could also damage people's relationships, a conference at the London School of Economics and Political Science was told.
Computer scientist and philosopher Dr Kieron O'Hara, of the University of Southampton, said today: "Users of new media, in their self-disclosure, are often as complicit in assaults on our privacy as the authorities which orchestrate surveillance."
Dr Adam Joinson of the University of Bath, an expert in computer communication, said: "As new technology and social media encourage sharing of the small details of everyday life, it also reduces privacy in social relationships, and may have negative effects on intimacy levels between people. If you desire intimacy, it may well be disastrous to add your partner to Facebook, or to follow them on Twitter."
About 300 experts are attending the annual conference of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association.
Kyle Doyle, who worked for a telecommunications company in Sydney, was caught faking a sick day when he boasted about it on Facebook in October 2008.
Reader views (1)
With Twitter at least you have some modicum of control over the message (but not who can see it).
With Facebook there is only the ILLUSION of control as the gnomes who control it keep changing the terms, and allow violations of their own API by questionable, sometimes even seamy game (cr)Apps..
Every time you play Farmtown or Mafia Wars you bleed a little more privacy. Better to drop Facebook altogether.
-Drunken Economist
- Drunken Economist, Nomad, USA, 08/01/2010 15:20
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