"Sharing" and its threat to our privacy


Being that we are able to talk about anything for this blog, I wanted to touch on this week’s theme of “sharing” and the direct threat it has to our privacy as social media users. A question that comes to mind in relation to this is: In the age of sharing that we presently live in, do we give up our privacy in order to have an online presence? Society has put this “pressure” to keep up a consistent online identity which we do by carrying out activities such as updating statuses, uploading pictures and videos, and checking in (sharing our location). In other words, we keep up our online identities by making personal information, once only accessible to us, available to the wider public: we share. “Sharing is the constitutive activity of social media” (John, p.52). Through social media, the concept of if you didn’t post it, did it really happen comes into play here and threatens your privacy that much more because many people feel obligated to post their day to day routine and activities. The website most closely linked with “sharing” is Facebook. Sharing was not an integral part of Facebook until 2006, but when it became a part of it, sharing become a threat to user’s privacy. Today, Facebook describes its mission as “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” (John, p.56). As John goes onto explain, this is marketing talk because Facebook “makes money through a model of advertising based on extremely granular knowledge about its users such that the more we share, the better for Facebook (p.56). This makes us the product of social media, not the consumer which is the way most people view themselves as. We don’t feel as though we are being observed, but we are – indirectly. We are losing control over what is being done with our personal information and the context in which it is shared, as well as who social media companies will share our data with. My point is discussing all of this, is in order to fulfil societal norms, we are risking our privacy and, in turn, allowing social media companies to capitalize off our sharing. We, as social media users need to start being more aware of the information we are sharing online as well as what information we consume.

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