Tag Archives: Public v. Private

the dangers of posting too much information on facebook

Posted on March 3, 2011 by nichola.smith


The dangers of posting too much info on social networks.
The above video shows the dangers of having a facebook account an other social networks. It talks about keeping your private life private,evaluating what you should and should not post on as your status update and how the information requested by social networks can be harmful to your lifestyle. the video to me therefore shows a connection knowing your audience a topic which have discussed in class.
Firstly, the updating of your status should be kept on a level where your personal life remains private.eg updating your status stating Im goin to be home alone for the night or stating the exact date and time of your whereabout for that particular day. It is extremely important not to do this in a case you do not know all of your friends personally on facebook. As Kayla Mitchell stated in the video she has over 400 friends an know them personally this is why she can share here whereabouts an personalize her status updates.
Another issue is the posting of pictures and being tagged in them. The consequencs of posting thes pictures can be extreme at times where many people have lost there jobs from the routine background checks done by employers or even denied a job by an employer because of their pictures being public. It is considered that the only way to have sum control over who see your profile is by costomizing your account to friends only.
Secondly,the information requested by these social networks such as your credit card informatiion, phone number, address should also be kept off facebook because it helps prevent identiity theft. There have been many reports of identity theft victims due to the fact that they provide these social networks with access to their personal infomation. On many times i been on facebooks and there are games such as farmville and yoville which require you to provide credit cards account to buy points to further your level in the game and to my knowledge there are people who do.
In conclusion the video provides you with knowledge of what you should be kept private and what shuld be kept public and also shows connection between our class discussion about ‘knowing your audience’ which should be highly considered while having a social network account.

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Homeless and on Twitter

Posted on February 24, 2011 by lusely.martinez

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/a-life-on-the-streets-captured-on-twitter/?ref=socialnetworking

This morning i came across this article on the New York Times website and it kind of blew my mind. To give you a quick idea on what this article is about, it starts off discussing a man named Derrick Wiggins, 44, who is homeless in NYC and who is on twitter. He is one of the four homeless men from the streets of NY who were given prepaid cellphones so that they could create a Twitter, develop a following, and then document or tweet about their lives. This is part of a project by three college grads who intern at the BBH advertising agency in TriBeCa. They were given $1,000 and told “Do something good, famously.” The result was a website called UnderHeard in New York, and the goal is to “help homeless New Yorkers speak for themselves through Twitter.”
The article goes on to tell us about the going ons of Wiggins life documented on his twitter page @awitness2011, for his now around 4,500 followers which are from all over the world including Brazil, Italy, and Australia.

This article i think speaks about how universal twitter, and social networking in general is. It’s kind of amazing actually that through social networking we now have the opportunity to take a glimpse into the life of the homeless: the shelters, the subway rides, the job searches, and thats just Wiggins.
In class yesterday we discussed why people post on facebook (this is twitter, but the same action of posting is involved), and maybe for some it’s attention, but for Wiggins “just the fact that somebody is listening” helped him persevere. He said, “I’ve received what I need to keep going.” Sometimes that’s all that is. The need to share your story and know others care. You feel less alone in the world. Twitter has obviously helped Wiggins keep going just as much as it’s allowed us to view the world from his shoes.

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Password Please

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Anna Soboleva

During many of our class discussions we talk about employer’s using items that we post on facebook or other social media sites to fire their employee’s or using the internet to find out things about prospective employee’s.

What about saving the time of entering a person’s name into a google search or any website that compile personal information such as http://pipl.com/, imagine your prospective employer asking you for your password and login information. This may sound unfathomable to many of us but according to the two article’s below this is exactly what happened to Robert Collins an employee of the Maryland Division of Corrections.

Mr. Collins was asked to give his login information for his facebook account while going through a re-certification processes. He had to sit as the interviewer logged in and read posts made by Mr.Collins as well as people he was friends with.

The case has now been taken up by the ACLU which states that this is a breach of the Federal Stored Communications Act and Maryland State law.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/want-job-password-please

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/11/02/should-employers-be-allowed-to-ask-for-your-facebook-login/71480#disqus_thread

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Your Personal Life Isn’t Protected . . .

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Andrew McKinney

But your work life is! All workers rejoice!  Maybe.  Probably because the National Labor Review Board can get involved in this case (as opposed to Stacey Snyder who was still in the process of getting certified as a teacher and was still in school), Dawnmarie Souza’s wrongful firing lawsuit against American Medical Response came down in her favor this week.  Souza was fired and denied union representation when she bad mouthed her boss with other colleagues on Facebook.  As much as people discount the importance of unions in America, her denial of union representaiton was what brought her to the NLRB and  probably what saved her.  In the case of Stacey Snyder you have a student-teacher on her own at the whim of her school administration.  Because Souza was able to argue that her firing was a violation of labor law, the NLRB, a relatively powerful government agency, took up her case.  Aside from the issue of what kind of workers should be protected by the NLRB and other federal laws and just how much leeway teachers in training should have, the real sticking point here for me is that Souza’s speech was protected because it was directly work related.  Snyder’s “drunken pirate” photo was not protected because it was not work related.  Work related speech, ostensibly”public” in that it effects a number of people, remains something that we are willing to protect.  Private speech and the life we live outside of work, evidently, is something we don’t really think is worthy of protection  In American labor law at-will employment means at-will firing and people should realize that what they think is private and not related to their work life actually has a way of becoming public enough to warrant their termination.  Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and other social media ride the line between what we understand to be public and private, so much so that maybe we need to do away with these terms in defining types of communication.  It should be no surprise that the legal system is struggling to understand the separation between the two when it comes to social media.

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