Health & Fitness
Information on Facebook: private or public?
Social networking has become a serious part of our culture, but is everything we put on Facebook protected? Consideration of the posts we make is an important habit to hold onto.
As I browsed through radio stations on my Pandora account one day, I noticed that somehow, my Facebook profile picture was also my Pandora profile picture. When did I say it was okay for pandora to access my photos on Facebook?!
This made me start wondering: how much of my information does Facebook give to other website without my knowledge? I keep my Facebook profile private so that people who are not my friends cannot access my photos or information. I feel unsettled by the fact that somehow websites like Pandora have access to my photos.
So this brought me to a broader question: Do we put too much information about ourselves on the internet through Facebook? To some degree, I say yes.
We have a loss of privacy if photos, videos, statuses, comments, posts, etc. are accessible to other websites. Some of us even put our home address, phone numbers, and other types of personal information on our Facebooks profiles. The odd thing about Facebook, though, is that we opt for it. We have the ability to stay off of Facebook, but most of us choose put our lives on the internet through this website.
Our culture has become so mindlessly connected to Facebook, that a lot of us don’t think twice about the things that we choose to put Facebook profiles. Facebook has become such a large company that even finding out exactly what information other websites can access is a hard process. But somehow we trust Facebook enough to put extensive amounts of information on our profiles.
Just as I suspected, as I began looking into what exactly Facebook allowed other websites to see, I stumbled across a Huffington Post article about just that.
Although I believe that too much of our personal information is available on the web through Facebook, I must admit that I am part of the group of white sheep that check Facebook daily. Facebook is a great way to connect with friends. We all like to be heard and seen, and I think Facebook at least makes us feel like people are paying attention to us.
So while I am saying that there is too much of our information on the web through Facebook, I am not saying that this means that we should all delete our Facebook accounts. Instead, we should simply recognize that what we put on our Facebook is owned by Facebook. Forever. Therefore, we should consider if we want the things we say to be owned by a company before we post them on Facebook.
