Trust and the Internet
3. Would
enabling more people to see your information benefit people in any way? Are
security policies too confining?
In
a technological era, everything is accessible on the internet and for some this
can be extremely risky. Despite privacy settings, there are still ways that
people’s information could be open and easily accessible. However, there are
some instances when allowing people to see information about yourself can be
beneficial. ‘LinkedIn’ is a site that connects people in a way that Twitter or
Facebook cannot. While it can be used to connect with old colleagues or
classmates, it’s main objective is connecting employee to employer. This is an
instance where making your information accessible can actually help you,
because you need to include your resume or the places you’ve worked as well as
your location to see if the employer is in close proximity to you. “The results
are ranked in order of proximity to me on my network, and if I then open an
individual record I will get the member’s profile, the detail of which is
entirely dependent on what they themselves have written. I will also get a list
of the other people in my network who are directly or indirectly linked to this
person, and an idea of the number of stages in message forwarding required to
reach them.” (Thew, 2008) As David Thew states, the detail of the members
profile is solely based on the amount of information that they chose to
incorporate in their page. Thus, expanded info is needed if you want to be
contacted to get a job through ‘LinkedIn.’ According to its page, “LinkedIn operates the world’s largest
professional network on the Internet with more than 313 million members in over
200 countries and territories.” With that said, there are also several ways to
deal with security policies. For example, Facebook and Twitter have different
settings that allow you to see who can view your profile or retweet your
tweets. For Facebook, you can either set
your profile to view everyone, friends, friends of friends, or completely
blocked off if someone does not have you as a friend. Same with Twitter, you
can set your profile to “private” which will only allow people you accept to
follow you, but even then they cannot retweet what you write to their
followers.
Overall, there are certain instances when allowing more information can
benefit you and it is also up to you to set what kind of privacy security you
want.
Work
Cited
Thew,
David. "LinkedIn — a User's Perspective." Business Information
Review 25.2 (2008): 87-90. Web. 29 Oct. 2014
"About LinkedIn." LinkedIn. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Oct.
2014.
Photo Courtesy : www.cs.stanford.edu/
