Social Media Privacy Protection - Research Paper Example

Number] Social Media Privacy Protection The popularity and usage of social media has reached to a whole new level in the 21st century. Today, one thing that every potential adult would have in common is an online relationship which allows them to talk to their friends, keep in touch with old friends, and share ideas and opinions with like-minded people. People share their information with their friends and family, but fail to understand that this information is being used by some others too. These are the social networking sites, hackers, criminals, stalkers, and at times our employers. With the popularity of the social media, there are increasing issues with social media privacy protection for which there have been a number of regulations and legal parameters, however despite those there are privacy issues that have taken over the lives of people. A number of cases are brought up in court regarding the social media privacy issues. Hence, the government needs to enforce stricter regulations on social media privacy protection to decrease the amount of crimes and breach of privacy. Social media is a growing phenomenon which has caught the attention of about 1 billion people worldwide. It was reported that more than a billion active users are on Facebook currently sharing their private information on the website. The government has been working on the privacy protection of social media since the 1990s when it was first introduced. However, the growing problems indicate that the governmental regulations aren’t strong enough to protect the privacy rights of many users (Albarran 161). Since social media has become a primary need for a person and it has been incorporated as a norm and trend in every society, there is a strong need for stricter policies. The government needs to lower the breach of privacy and criminal activities such as identity theft because of which they must review their current regulations. The government cannot reduce the use and popularity of social media because everyone needs it. Without having access to social media, it isn’t possible for a person to survive in a social setting. Social media allows people to interact, share ideas, be up-to-date, and communicate for pleasure and business purposes (Lipschultz 151). Businesses, academic institutions, and big events invitations are also communicated and sent through social media. Gone are the days when invitations were sent through post and e-mails are also slowly becoming less popular. Social media allows people to communicate through pictures, comments, pages, groups, and events which make it easier to interact with and give out a message to a large number of people easily. Social media has made life much easier and is the basic source of communication and interaction for many organizations. Marketing departments highly use social networking sites to reach their target audience and plan their strategies. Advertisers spend a huge amount of investment on social networking sites as they know social media is the best platform nowadays (Fuchs 165). Social media is just everywhere around us. Just as businesses do, large corporations and even academic institutions now use social media to convey their messages or important notices to students. It is a part of our lives now. It is also important to be in touch with friends and family living far away. Social networking allows people to reduce the distance and connect with each other easily through pictures, videos, and almost live experiences. People develop their networks to interact with people who have similar interests and create new relationships and generate new ideas (Albarran 161). Social networks are of many types which have different privacy implications and their privacy policies may also change as per their policies. There are personal networks that allow the users to create their personal profiles and connect with the others forming an online relationship. People share their personal information with the approved users who have access to their information such as age, location, gender, employment, education, pictures, videos, and other details. Some of these details may be shared with users who are not approved. Social update networks are another type of social media which allow people to post statuses through which they can communicate with others. The stats updates can be accessible to only those who are approved users (Baskin, 2014). Location networks are another type of social networking which use the mobile phones to update one’s location which is visible to approved users. Content-sharing networks are the type which is designed to share content such as pictures, videos, and music. These sites make multi-media file sharing easier and faster. These different types of social networking sites make online relationships, communication, and sharing so much easier. People use them for business and pleasure which is why it has become highly popular. The use of social media cannot be controlled as it has become a necessity but the privacy protection regulations can be controlled and made stricter by the government (Albarran 161). USA has many data protection laws that protect the privacy of internet users. These privacy laws differ from country to country where governments make efforts to regulate the use of personal information. The US has a sectoral approach on a federal level for the data protection regulations. In this, some industries are covered and some are not. On a state level, there are many states that have enacted the privacy legislation in some form. Some of the most important data protection Lawson a federal basis are the Privacy Act of 1974, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and the Social Networking Online Protection Act (SNOPA) (Fuchs 165). The Privacy Act 1974 ensures that an individual’s private information is protected from the government as government is the biggest user and abuser of private information. The regulation governs the maintenance, collection, use, and dissemination of individuals’ personal information which is stored in federal agencies’ records. The records of individuals are under control of the agencies and they can access the information by the individuals’ names. The Privacy Act ensures that the private information is not disclosed without the consent of the individual. The act also gives individuals an access to amend the records (Lipschultz 151). COPPA is the legislation which protects the privacy of children who are under 13. The act is directed towards the websites that are targeted to children or the websites which are knowingly being used by children. This act regulates the policies of these websites imposing an obligation on them that they must publish their privacy policies and specify whether they are collecting, using, or disclosing any personal information of the users. The websites must also not obtain private information from children without the consent of parents. Parents can also request on the basis of which the type of information and the use of that information will be disclosed and if parents want, the information can no further be collected from that child (Albarran 161). The SNOPA was introduced in the Congress in 2012 in order to protect the employees from giving out their social media passwords to their employers. This has been a growing concern in the society and this federal bill tends to prohibit this practice. Employers, under this act, are prohibited from asking or accessing the online data of an employee without their permission or authorization (Osborne, 2014). Applicants and employees cannot be asked for their personal online information as it is considered a violation of their privacy (Fuchs 165). The most important question remains whether there is any social media privacy or not. The social media privacy and security has become the increasing concern of people today. More and more lawsuits are being filed on these issues and people fight over the issue that whether employers have the right to access the employee’s social media data when they are hiring or firing them. Several divorce proceedings have took place only on the basis of Facebook posts or the fact that spouses are found being in contact with their exes. Family and friends also post stuff which could destroy the attorney-client privilege and tank the entire lawsuit (Baskin, 2014). The basic point of the social media is to communicate, share, connect, and exchange information with peers and like-minded people, to keep in touch with old friends, to form new friendships, and to engage in a social network. By design, this phenomenon is not private. The only way in which the data put online can be protected is by not putting it up at all. Every user must be aware that no matter how strict the privacy policies and settings of the website are, it cannot restrain the website managers and hackers to access that data. Hackers and privacy breaches have existed ever since the social media has existed. The social media framework comes with the risk of privacy breaches (Reyes, 2014). The location-based services, mergers, and marketing are some of the ways through which privacy is breached. Social networking websites will stay in the society for a long time and till they remain, there will be privacy issues. Every user is taking a privacy risk which may at times be worthy to take but at other times they can be avoided, and sometimes they are at the cost of the business activity with a social network. Every user must be aware of the risks involved in the online activities. Advertising on social media is very effective and common but users must be aware that accessing the advertisements mean giving the advertisers their personal information (Lipschultz 151). It can be said that the current regulations on social media privacy protection are not effective as there are increased risks involved and privacy breaches are taking place very commonly. There are a number of controls assessed by the federal government but they don’t seem to be strict enough to be effective in practice (Osborne, 2014). In the current race, the regulations imposed by the government aren’t effective enough to protect the privacy of social media users. This is highly important as social media users are furious about their privacy issues and demand the government to take stand. The government has also taken into account these considerations and are working on imposing stricter policies to regulate the social media privacy (Reyes, 2014). Lawsuits and the increasing social problems are the evidence that social media privacy is not protected. Hackers and criminals continue to access the private information of users but that is a dilemma which is unsolved. Social media websites are also to be blamed to a great extent as they do not impose proper privacy settings. All the personal information is always available to them and hence the users are never private. The society faces issues such as identity theft, intellectual property issues, fraud, misrepresentation, and impersonation. Young girls and boys are fooled by social media users and they are subjected to issues such as rape and fraud (Albarran 161). There must be regulations by the government to control this social issue. Another major reason why governments must impose stricter regulations on social media privacy protection is because of the social networking websites. They are highly seen ignoring the privacy laws causing trouble to the users as well as the increase in cyber crime rate. The government is concerned about these social media companies that ignore the privacy laws and thus they decided to impose stricter sanctions on them when they are broken. The social media companies take a great amount of personal information from the users and mishandle it often. The investigations carried out by the government officials revealed that social media companies as big as Google and Facebook were failing to follow the privacy laws (Fuchs 165). The regulations are deeply under consideration to stop this ignorance and to push greater accountability standards and enforcement powers for these companies within legislation. Legislation will now have stricter policies for social media companies accompanied by stricter penalties for them if they breach the privacy laws. Major fines can be imposed on companies that breach the privacy regulations and it has been observed that high amount of fines generally are effective (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2013). It is the duty of the government to ensure the privacy protection of the users and keep an eye on the social media companies. Social media companies must not be allowed to change their privacy settings without prior notice to the users as new settings may often make information public automatically (Lipschultz 151). Thus, the government must ensure that strict social media privacy protection is regulated. This can be done in a number of ways as researchers have already started working on how the new methods must be implemented in understanding and controlling social networking. Researchers have found out that there must be user-friendly tools for the protection of privacy. Probably everyone in the society has started to believe that social networking websites are rather beneficial and advantageous as people communicate easier and have easier access to people around the world. They can contact and talk to their closest friends no matter how far they are and share their experiences live with them (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2013). Despite the positives, users are facing issues with privacy issues as they publish posts and pictures which can have side effects on their internet identity. Users often desire interactional privacy which is the protection of the private sphere of every user in their online relationships with people. There have been many suggested improvements for this but these improvements may be too rigid to be applied in the practical setting. They may be very complicated for the social media companies to manage as they host and solve a number of different problems at one time (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2013). Researchers have found ways in which they can understand the users better in order to create user-friendly tools for their privacy. A software design project for interactional privacy within online social networks is being made which would create a new method to collect and evaluate data on users’ networking habits. This way the researchers will be able to highlight the main issues in the privacy settings and thus create more effective privacy tools (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2013). Researchers used several techniques such as qualitative interviews to find out the appropriate ways to improve the privacy system. They have also looked into quantitative methods to carry out surveys and measure statistics which would help in studying the activities of the users. They have also ensured that the users are not influenced by this research (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2013). The content and the details of the user activities are not included in this survey, however only the technical functions used by users are recorded and judged. Users are also given a chance to comment their experiences directly to the software. This is how users’ perspectives can be known and used to implement appropriate changes in the privacy system and tools. Researchers will be able to improve the design of the social networks and hence ensure that government imposed regulations are strictly being followed by the social media companies (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2013). Conclusively, as social media is an important part of our lives, it is the duty of the government to ensure that the privacy of the users is protected effectively. Since social media is a necessity and a positive impact on the users’ lives, the privacy protection policies must be improved in order to allow users a safe browsing experience. Work Cited Albarran, Alan. The Social Media Industries. NY: Routledge, 2013. Print. Baskin, Jonathan. Privacy Issues Could Threaten the Future of Commercial Social Media. USA: Forbes, 2014. Print. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. "Effective privacy protection in social networks." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 11 June 2013. Web . Fuchs, Christian. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. UK: SAGE, 2013. Print. Lipschultz, Jeremy. Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law, and Ethics. NY: Routledge, 2014. Print. Osborne, Charlie. Facebook at work: Thanks, but no thanks. USA: ZDNET, 2014 Reyes, Edgar. Social Media Security: A struggle in keeping users’ online privacy. USA: International Business Times, 2014. Print. Read More