What’s your privacy status? Tracey-Lee investigates the potential dangers of your so-called ‘safe haven’.  

Facebook burst into cyber space for most of us in early 2007. Julia*(19), a Law student at the University of Cape Town, logged in for the first time when she was just sixteen. “Facebook was new and exciting and I loved the applications and the easy way I could connect with friends” she explained. For Julia*, everything seemed fun and entertaining but what she didn’t know was the potential danger she would soon encounter. She had no idea about the very many cyber-stalkers lurking between the pages of her beloved Facebook. Soon after using Facebook, “a man started sending me dodgy inbox messages like ‘I wanna F*ck you’ but I managed to block him” she said. For Julia* and many other teenage girls, this would be her first threatening experience and certainly not her last.

According to a study done by Sonia Livingstone, more and more teenagers seem to be unsure about their Facebook privacy status. In her study, many teens have explained that they are not sure where their privacy settings are, owing to unfriendly navigation or internet illiteracy, even though they’ve been using the site for quite some time. Alexia* (20), a friend of Julia*, explains that Facebook and other social networking sites “can be potentially dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing like putting up addresses and stuff which is basically asking for stalkers”. Just last year, the Facebook community issued an ultimatum to multi millionaire 26-year-old Mark Zuckerburg; “give us more privacy or we’ll log off forever.” By 2010 Facebook had implemented new simplified privacy settings that were more user friendly than in the past. The truth though, is that the majority of teens nowadays have been educated about the dangers of social networking sites and now with Facebook’s enhanced privacy settings, it’s making it harder for such predators to penetrate teens cyber-worlds.

With that being said however, the possible cons are not eradicated by simply ticking a box in your privacy settings, unfortunately there still begs the question about internal privacy from family members, colleagues, bosses and friends. One may think they are private but are you really protected? Your biggest threat may come from inside your private network. Whilst enjoying their time on these social networks, teens often forget that nearly all who know them can see what they are doing. Alexia* explains that “having family members, your boss/teacher and other friends’ parents as Facebook friends definitely limits what [she] puts on Facebook.”  Something that we all need to remember is that social networking sites like Facebook, will not always be completely private.

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