Privacy is Not Dead

Crisis of Social Networking

The emergent of the social networking such as Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter has risen up the privacy issue of the end-users as its idea that making public information more public could violate user’s privacy. In relation of this, new privacy setting model has been implemented by Facebook in order to enhance the level of protection of its user’s information.

Use your friend lists

The new privacy setting model of Facebook allows the users to have more control on their private information as the users have the ability to control who they want their content being view. On top of that, the users can even apply different privacy settings regarding to different groups of friend list such as Family, Friends and Co-worker. By doing this, it enables the users to have greater level of privacy as they might not want to share their personal life photo or video with their co-worker.

Remove yourself from the search engine

Furthermore, the new policy model also allows the users to control their account’s visibility from the Facebook and other search engines. By doing this, it will be able to enhance the users' privacy as third parties cannot easily search or access to the users’ account through search engines.

Burger King challenge the Facebook privacy issue

Ad replacement which can be consider as the main source of income for a social networking. For instance Facebook has became the largest display advertiser, serving 176.3 billion display ads, versus Yahoo who served 131.6 billion banner ads (Nick 2010). Moreover, Facebook has always placed high level of rules and regulation and observation in the selection of the ad replacement. In the light of this, Facebook has banned one of the Burger King advertisements called Whopper Sacrifice as it has criticized the users’ privacy. This is because the advertisement required the users delete ten users from the friend list in order to exchange for a free whopper burger. By doing this, it has criticized the user privacy as the deleted user will tend to be disclosing in the user NewFeeds (Geerce 2010).

In conclusion, based on the above discussion it shows that the privacy of social networking can be well maintain through the advancement of the technology and the ethical of the social networking. On top of that, the role of end-user also placed heavy in maintaining the privacy issue as the end-user should aware of the privacy setting and practice it in regards of their social networking, otherwise it will become worthless even if the social networking implemented a higher level of privacy model.

Reference List

Geerce. D, 2010, ‘ Facebook bans Burger King ad campaign’, viewed 13 June 2010, http://www.techdigest.tv/2009/01/facebook_bans_b.html>.

Nick, OM, 2010, ‘Facebook Becomes Largest Display Advertiser’, viewed 14 June 2010, http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/facebook-becomes-largest-display-advertiser/>.

Mark, Z, 2010, ‘The Facebook Blog’, viewed 14 June 2010, http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391922327130>.