Tutorial Week 4 part 2

The terms and services for social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. are often disregarded by the millions of people who use and access these sites everyday. It seems that the majority of people assume that their privacy and best interests are being looked after by the company, so they continue to broadcast their life to the entire Internet through status updates, photos, ‘likes’ and of course ‘tweets.’ However, I’ve unfortunately seen ‘The Social Network’ and let me tell you, Mark Zuckaberg doesn’t care about maintaining our privacy. In order to participate and have a Facebook page, like with any program or social networking site, one must agree to the Terms of Use/Condition, but how many people would take the time to read these conditions? It is extremely important to understand these conditions before all of your private information is on the Internet. My understanding from reading these conditions is, once you give your information to Facebook, they have license to use your information and keep it indefinitely. Although, Facebook allow you to change your own Privacy and application settings, each page is automatically set to completely open privacy settings, meaning, unless the user is to look and physically change the settings themselves, your information is a free for all! After reading the Facebook terms and conditions, and honestly being slightly baffled by them, I eventually came to the conclusion that one has to be extremely cautious with the personal information uploaded to social networking sites such as Facebook.