***Most of us use social networking sites and share a lot of personal information unknowingly at times.
This personal info can be used in a myriad of ways with the advanced technologies that we have without the user even aware of this violation.
Take sites like Facebook , MySpace etc…Most of us have profiles there with name , age , location , alumni , political views , marital status etc that we put up almost unthinkingly !
We have status messages concerning our day to day lives.
We share Pictures , videos of ourselves ,family and friends.
Our you so certain that just by setting your privacy settings that you are secure ?***
ye it does end privacy... but the person who adds photos and videos are solely responsible for making it public or making it available to all friends. When they do that, then they are also aware that their info is not so private anymore.
There are many onlookers from your friends list, and you do not even know who visited you the most among the friends, and who is abusing your profile/photos/videos.
I had my account opened and did post pictures of family and good times. I realized that I do not want to share all the info with all the friends on the list.
That's the best thing I did when it comes to face book. I closed my account.
Our you so certain that just by setting your privacy settings that you are secure ?***
The answer to that question is no... and as far as the main question posited in these articles whether social networking means the end of privay... my answer again is no it doesn't. It just means the end of privacy as we knew it until 2003 - 2005. With new web 2.0 style technologies which include social networking sites, we as users need to be more cognizant of our actions in the public sphere. No one is forcing us to share our private lives on social networking sites... it's a conscious decision that we make, so the onus is on us to educate ourselves on how the information we disclose can be used in different ways.
Facebook and Google are two of those companies on the internet that have really bad privacy provisions and yet people use their services without even taking the time to read the fine print. I personally am a big fan of google and also use facebook sparingly... but I'm very particular about the types of interactions I engage in using their various services because I am aware of the types of privacy clauses in their end-user agreements.
The only thing which I think service providers need to do is make privacy information more accessible to end-users, but other than that, it's the end-user's responsibility to ensure they differentiate between what's private and what's public about their lives.