Trust and the Internet

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.

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