We, as individuals seem to be obsessed with privacy, especially when it comes to guarding our own details. But do we feel the same when we find a few juicy tidbits about strangers especially if they are celebrities in their own right? The social network site Facebook can certainly bear witness to this. The issue on privacy has been raked up on the site time and again while its creators come up with a specific control each time only to have other users gleefully break through it. But is Facebook quite as innocent when it comes to privacy? We wonder!
Seeing your own ‘mug shot’ being pasted as some other individual is definitely unnerving. But there is precise little that you can do about it while Facebook allows its members to post photos both their own as well as that of others. In fact, Facebook developers actively invite their users to play with photos and events and you might be at a loss when you find your intensely private moments being publicly put up on the friendly social site that make you turn all shades of the rainbow particularly when you get to be congratulated by strangers on the net. True, the site is just great for re connecting with long lost friends, but do you really want your current heart throb to see you at your nerdy best while listening avidly to your Physics professor? This is one aspect of Facebook that is bound to make you go Grrr in frustration.
With Facebook turning out to be the most popular place to hang around, especially for the netizens of today, does it feel good to see your friend, your employer or your old uncle Joe, whom you abhorred right through your childhood, sporting a public profile on Facebook? It feels even worse to anticipate that you may be just a mouse click away from your ex whom you had conveniently ditched or your erstwhile employer who can now call you all the names in the dictionary and a few outside of it once he happens to chance upon your smiling angelic face lighting up your online profile. But the worst is yet to come! Your mom may feel the urge to turn net savvy all of a sudden and create a profile on this particular social networking site with the sole objective of keeping an eye on you.
There are many other complaints creeping up against Mark Zuckerberg, the founder who is currently under all kinds of pressure. Being private and on the World Wide Web does not seem to be conceivable right now even though Zuckerberg is trying his best to placate us with a number of newer settings all of which promise to keep us as private as we want.
