Question

MINIMUM WORDS: 350

How carefully do you monitor or consider what you post on social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat? Do you think you disclose differently when disclosing online? In this paper, discuss these questions and some strategies that you can use to ensure that you are disclosing appropriately online.

Answer 1

The publicity over the risks of disclosing

private information that may be used to construct fake

profiles, stalking and other nefarious activity seems to have had little effect on many SNS users. The desire to be

part of a community, often with hundreds of friends, most of which the person will n

ever meet and who

themselves may be using fake identities, seems to have only a modest effect on the users

’

sense of caution. The

results indicate that people are generally willing to use real names, disclose personal attributes such as dates of

birth and

hometown locations and often post personal pictures that could identify themselves, family members

and friends. The use of privacy

settings

where only ‘friends’ can view posts, videos or pictures is largely negated

by the ready acceptance of both males and

females to accept friend requests from people whom they have no

prior knowledge of and no method to ascertain the genuine

ne

ss of the identity or desire to follow them.

These

results indicate that whilst the messages about the risks of over

-

disclosure are

regularly repeated, most social

networking site users are making their own decisions about what they wish to disclose and often these decisions

are not fully informed by the reading the user agreements and are putting users at risk because of their desire

to

belong to these communities and share their information with strangers