iCount Youth Account





Social Media Privacy Settings – An Oxymoron
           
If you are an Internet user, you are a target for multi-billion dollar advertising.  That is simply a fact. When you sign up for any social media website, you are opening yourself up to allowing strangers to view your habits and personal information.

Most social media sites claim to offer privacy settings that are user defined. So you “allow” or “block” certain items from being shared with everyone, or just your friends, or whatever you choose.  These settings may actually protect you from being found by the guy who picked on you in third grade, but not as a target for advertising and the potential for your address to be “out there” somewhere. 

If you actually take time to read the site’s privacy policy, you will most likely be amazed at the assumed permissions they take from you when you register! These permissions include sharing your personal information with third-party sites, tracking your site usage, watching your preferences for site content and so on.  Many go on to justify it, explaining that once they look at all the data on you, they will be better able to provide services that appeal to you.  If you use the social site as a starting point to register for apps and games on third-party sites, the third-party then sends your details back to the main site. It’s all in their agreements with each other and nothing to do with you.  Visiting these third-party sites while still logged in to your social media profile page also sends data to the third-party so you can all of a sudden receive content that is targeted to your own likes and preferences. 

Music preferences, employment info, clubs and associations; everything you add in to your public profiles on social media websites are open for sharing across the entire World Wide Web.  If you list it as something you like, then the items must become public and are linked to public profile pages. If you prefer not to go public or link up, then you don’t get the content or app.

Any status messages or things you post are scanned for keywords and linked to other similar items so content can be grouped and searched externally.  It is all very complex.

If you dig deep enough, you can find the links to block content sharing, personal identifying information, and likes and preferences, but each category of data usually needs its own block separately, and it can be very complicated and time-consuming to do it.  Plus, many websites arbitrarily make changes to privacy settings as a matter of course, so you have to revisit the blockages every couple months or so to ensure they are still in place. 

So, do you never sign up to places like MySpace, Facebook or Twitter?  It is simply a matter of awareness. These sites provide a service that people enjoy, and if the users remain well aware of what types of items are being shared they can make sure they are making the right choices as they access content.  Credit card numbers and home addresses and so on should always be protected, so it is good to take time to block that stuff from going out, even monthly if necessary, but if you like puzzle games, is it so bad that everywhere you go online you see links to game sites? You choose.