This paper will analyze the article “How to Avoid Facebook and Twitter Disasters”, by Christopher Null, PC World (2009). The article looks at the significant consequences of Facebook's privacy features. The continuous changes of a number of these features by Facebook, can confuse its users, as well as have the potential to generate various problems and difficulties for anybody who has and uses a Facebook account. Some of these problems are discussed throughout the article. All these issues need to be considered by the Facebook members.
Sharing too many information in your profile when one of your Facebook contact is your boss or someone who exercises or can exercise authority over the user, the author provides two examples of Facebook user who got into trouble because of Facebook. The first one is the case of someone who claimed to be ill to miss a day's work because to relax. After checking the user's Facebook profile, her boss realized that she had dedicated her entire day to leisure activities and obviously, she had not been sick. The second, someone who had been playing Facebook games instead of working. The game advertises itself in the Facebook profile of gamers by providing a short report of their score, which was seen by the user's bosses, who were obviously not amused at the amount of time spent by their employee playing instead of carrying out work.
[...] The over- sharing nature of Facebook can easily generate this kind of situations and Null provides a range of ideas to keep someone's location safe. This is particularly important not only in the case of unwanted “surprise visits”, but also in terms of identity fraud, aspect that the article seems to ignore. A number of criminal companies are able to obtain addresses and contact details of Facebook members which are later used on a wide range of criminal activities, including identity fraud. [...]
[...] How to Avoid Facebook and Twitter Disasters This paper will analyze the article “How to Avoid Facebook and Twitter Disasters”, by Christopher Null, PC World (2009). The article looks at the significant consequences of Facebook's privacy features. The continuous changes of a number of these features by Facebook, can confuse its users, as well as have the potential to generate various problems and difficulties for anybody who has and uses a Facebook account. Some of these problems are discussed throughout the article. [...]
Online reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee