Social Networking, Privacy Issues

Social networking sites allow students to connect with users with similar interests, build and maintain relationships with friends, and feel more connected with their campus. The foremost criticisms of online social networking are that students may open themselves to public scrutiny of their online personas and risk physical safety by revealing excessive personal information. This review outlines issues of online social networking in higher education by drawing upon articles in both the lay press and academic publications. New points for pharmacy educators to consider include the possible emergence of an “e-professionalism” concept; legal and ethical implications of using online postings in admission, discipline, and student safety decisions; how online personas may blend into professional life; and the responsibility for educating students about the risks of online social networking.This creates an interesting problem for most sites that allow users to post music, photos or video. For instance, several content owners have sued YouTube, the video sharing site, for copyright infringement, and YouTube has claimed a 512(c) defense. Since YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, its future business plan most likely involves serving advertisements according to the kind of video that users view or search for. If the site does this, however, it could amount to a financial benefit directly attributable to the sharing of copyrighted materials.
Social networking sites example is Facebook are mediated public sites (ie, places in which mediating technology allow people to gather publicly.) Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are for unique properties of mediated publics. The “conversations” may be recorded indefinitely, can be searched, replicated, and altered, and may be accessed by others without the knowledge of those in the conversation. Pictures or comments may remain linked with an individual long after the user's attitudes and behaviors have matured. Furthermore, individuals conversing on social network sites imagine their audience and speak to the generally accepted norms of that audience. What they may not understand is that there may be multiple audiences, including those with some type of power or authority over them. Those other audiences may hold completely different views on what is socially acceptable.Facebook profiles are based within a culture and can lend themselves to misinterpretation, partially because of unidentifiable audiences that are inherent in online social networking environments. What students perceive as perfectly normal and harmless expressions among friends and classmates (their audience), may be perceived entirely different by parents, faculty members, and current or potential employers. The ability to define the audience through privacy features is an important component of Facebook; however, that ability “does not necessarily imply an understanding about the ways – both good and bad – that the information might be used.for”Relatively few users invoke the privacy features available to them.