Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy and confidentiality has definitely changed a lot since new media as we know it such as social networking sites such as Facebook came into existence. From the time you sign up as a member to a social networking site, you are a product of their company as well as an easy target for many criminals worldwide. One way to see how this is true is by simply searching your name or email on Google and see how many results appear in that search. It is likely that you will be surprised at the amount of searches you will find and bizarre websites you never heard of with your information such as your email address or profile picture will appear as well. No one is ever safe to a point where they will never be a target for some kind of danger but the types of danger ranges because in reality no one can ever be too safe.

On social networking sites such as Instagram, privacy is a major pro rather than a con to their use of service. If you try to follow an Instagram user that has their privacy settings enabled the first thing you will notice is that you are only able to see their profile picture but you are not able to use right click functions or see any of their pictures unless you submit a request to follow that user and it will be left up to the user's will if he/she will accept your request. Now the con to that privacy setting is if your share your Instagram photos through another social networking site such as the parent of Instagram which is Facebook. Those pictures are still viewable only through Facebook in an album which is titled as Instagram Photos but otherwise on the Instagram service itself, users are not able to get around those privacy settings. Confidentiality these days on the internet using forms of new media is tricky.

Most people when they sign up the first thing they will do is list their full name, email address, date of birth as well family members. What might seem perfectly fine for others will also seem perfectly fine for identity theft criminals. It is very easy for identity theft criminals to obtain your email address and trace information leading back to you which may be very useful for them such as linking your email address to bank accounts, credit cards and much more that people would not think of. Identity theft is one of the major breaches in security on the internet when it comes to new media. Out of everything I have mentioned, it is impossible to be too be safe because everyone is vulnerable to some type of danger in any way but what users of new media can do to protect themselves is to just be smart and be wise as well as not sharing to much information or information that you do not want to share with the world.