Blog #6

For this blog, I googled my name and used one of our readings to better inform myself on matters of privacy. It also bears mentioning that many sites, social media and otherwise have privacy policies, though as I’ll point out, these can be abused in strange ways. The conversation will start with how little I found after googling my name, but also what else I found in my search - and how that corresponds to search algorithms - and then turn to a discussion of online privacy.

So I googled my name, and unsurprisingly, the number one search result was my LinkedIn page. This page (found here) has information about my work as a writing consultant at CNU, as well as contact information so others can reach me via email or calling. With so much personal identifying information, or PII (2014), it's no wonder that the top search results for my name were LinkedIn and Facebook, as these are the places that have that information (Boyd and Marwick p. 1053). But my look at LinkedIn didn't end with it being the first result. I figured that I should check what privacy settings LinkedIn has for its users, and I must say, it's quite extensive. Unlike other social media sites like Instagram where your account is either public or private (2014), LinkedIn provides the option of privacy for nearly every separate piece of data on your page (Boyd and Marwick p. 1053). Needless to say, I was impressed with LinkedIn's flexibility when it came to matters of privacy, but it also makes sense. LinkedIn isn't like other social media sites in that it is mainly used for entertainment. Instead, this is a site used professionally to reach out to possible employers and others in the workforce. Having a higher degree of flexibility when dealing with personal contact information is just common sense.

       That also brings up a point from the reading on privacy I used when preparing for this blog. The reading (2014) gives an example of someone who is a part of two "groups" on Facebook, and as these entities are separate, the person shares different things with both groups, one being for family and the other being for colleagues (Boyd and Marwick, p. 1053). LinkedIn has a similar means of splitting up content, though admittedly it's more like an on off switch with a middle-ground. For example, let's say you're adding your phone number to your LinkedIn page, but you don't want random people calling you because they found your number publicly displayed. You can change your privacy settings so that only those connected to you on LinkedIn - which you have to approve - can see that information. So if possible employers want to contact you, all they have to do is connect with you, which in turn lets you know they're interested.

What I noticed outside of LinkedIn about my own online footprint is that not only was my Instagram not showing up in search results - likely a result of it being a private account - but one of the top results for my name was actually my mom's phone number. The number was available through Facebook and listed me, with my full name and middle initial, as a contact that could be reached through her. That wasn't just surprising, it was concerning. To know that it's so easy for someone to find the contact information for another person like that by only googling their name put the lack of privacy online into perspective. Yes, technically that wouldn't be an issue if more people restricted personal information to friends only, but people don't tend to do that until it's too late. By that time their information is already being circulated online and hiding it on their page does nothing to prevent the spread on other sites/pages.

 The issue just reminds me of a reading we did previously about body image or revenge porn, and how a man private messaged a woman on Facebook calling her a slut, but when the woman publicized the terrible behavior by posting it to her wall, it was taken down by Facebook for violating the privacy policy. In other words, Facebook, and likely other social media companies, have a tendency to protect their policies, even if they encourage private harassment. Sadly, I don't remember just which journal article this came from, so I can't officially cite it here, but I do know that it dealt with body image or nude photographs and harassment, which could be any of 3-4 readings we've done in the past.

Finally, I just want to talk about privacy policies in online formats. I think that LinkedIn probably does it best out of all the social media sites I used/have used (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and would you count YouTube here?). The ability to effectively curate who has access to your information in the way that LinkedIn does far surpasses Twitter and Instagram's "all or nothing" policy with accounts. However, the information posted to something like an Instagram account is usually far more personal than a LinkedIn account, which is used mostly for business, so perhaps the "all or nothing" model works best for sites used primarily for entertainment.

 In the end, privacy should be something that everyone can turn on when it relates to their private information. Privacy is not something that people should be denied, but it's also not something that should be abused. Companies that claim hate speech and harassment to be protected forms of speech via private chats should take another look at just what their privacy is protecting. It's not protecting people at that point, but is rather being used as a covert means of attack without repercussion.

                                                              Works Cited:                                                                           Boyd, Danah and Marwick, Alice E. (2014). "Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate 

Context in Social Media." New Media and Society, vol. 16 (7), pp. 1051-1067. DOI: 

10.1177/1461444814543995.