Are We Really That Private?

I would like to think that I am a private person on the Internet. I use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and many more social network platforms but I keep a lock on my security. I don’t like the idea of “hanging dirty laundry out on social media”, so I keep my information shared with only friends that I know because that way people who I do not know won’t fine anything out about me. When Googling myself (which was for this blog post only!) I could not find any links to my social networking sites, which shows that there is not a lot of information about me on the Internet.

My Facebook has high privacy settings and is ‘White walled’ which means that anyone who I am not a friend with on Facebook will only see a blank white wall. I only accept people who I know on Facebook and I recently deleted a lot of people who I am not in contact with anymore. My Twitter is different because I hardly follow anyone that I know, I follow people who share the same interests as me. However I don’t post personal things about me on there and I have formed a lot of friendships through Twitter.

My Instagram is public which I know is bad as people can take your pictures and even make fake accounts of you however I hate it when someone I’m trying to find has their account as private which is why mine is not but I know that is not a good enough excuse! My LinkedIn is a competently different type of social media as I treat it like an online CV so I only connect with people in the radio industry because it may lead to things in the future.

I would like to end this blog post with a quote from ‘It’s complicated: The Social Lives Of Networked Teens’: “Just because teenagers use social media sites to connect with others doesn’t mean they don’t care about their privacy”. I feel that is defiantly correct in a lot of peoples circumstances especially mine.