Privacy issues related to online social networking sites
In order to begin to explore issues around using online social spaces for learning and teaching, part of the first task in week 1 moves use outside of the Brookes Virtual VLE. However, it is important before we do that to remember that the nature of online social spaces, the size of their memberships and their terms of use have implications for privacy and disclosure. The conclusions to the research by Gross and Acquisti (2005), indicate how users of social networking spaces, such as Facebook, provide often highly personal and sensitive information with little concern for privacy risks (page 79).
Even if there were no risk of malicious use of information generated by our personal online profiles, frequently potential employers Google applicants - making it a reputation manager as well as a search engine - to obtain information from our online profiles where they can. If we Google ourselves we are also likely to see to what extent information may remain available long after it is relevant or accurate. This may be problematic if we no longer have access to change or remove such information. A further concern is that it is possible to create fake identities in online spaces, making it difficult to verify that people are who they claim to be.
Most social software applications require registration with a real name and a verifiable email address (though it is quick and easy to set up a free gmail account for these purposes). But before undertaking online activities in the more public online social spaces we need to consider how much personal information we are prepared to disclose, whether we want to use pseudonyms as screen names, to what extent we want to be identifiable by photograph, geographical location and/or occupation etc. It is important to bear in mind that privacy and disclosure settings in social spaces can change from when we first set them up.
We need to be selective about what we disclose in different spaces. This may vary depending on the particular nature of the online social space and our purpose for using it . For example CV and related employability information might be usefully disclosed in detail in an appropriately chosen environment in order to point prospective employers to such information. Or, in academia, it might be important to offer detail in social networking environments about some aspects of our work that are 'reputation enhancing' or enable others to find us easily.
Having armed ourselves with the above cautions I hope we are ready to proceed with the first task.
References
Gross, R. and Acquisti, A. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society. Alexandria, VA, USA, ACM: 71-80.
