Watch what you post and change your IP
For those of you that don’t know, (where have you been?) Facebook is one of the world’s leading social networking sites, in competition and sometimes cahoots with MySpace. The two sites, who’s concept would have been laughed at years ago, have taken root and flourished in the semi-narcissistic generation today; infamously dubbed the Information Generation. They didn’t get this title for no reason, kids today can use computers much better than their parents, and miles better than their techno-phobic grandparents. These sites allow a youth, (and more recently, every body) to have a place of their own to customize as they wish, and can constantly change to adapt to your every day moods. Perhaps one day you are excited to go to the beach; so your background is all sunlight and tropical themed, while another day your page is plastered in gray, representing your boring day at the office. For some though, the profile capabilities aren’t even the greatest aspect of the site. They just love the fact that nearly everyone is on the site, or some other site, so they can communicate and share pictures with all of their friends from one convenient place, instead of rustling around through an impersonal phone, hoping someone will answer.
These sites are, by their nature, not anonymous whatsoever. It would defeat the purpose of the site for some uses; how can you communicate with your friends if they don’t know who you are? A couple of students recently did not take this advice to heart, and posted a FaceBook page all about faculty and members of their beauty school. The page advocated freedom of speech and to speak your honest mind about their teachers and other students. After some rude comments about some of the teachers, some students, including the one who started it all up, were charged with bullying and harassment of officials.
There are many other instances of this too. A group of prison guards formed a FaceBook page in which they talked and discussed matters and internal politics of the prison. It was all guards here, and no one else was allowed to communicate, but somehow the officials gained entrance. After they read some of their peers and workers dissenting opinions from their own, they sent out threatening cease and desist letters, and even fired some. The guards were outraged, and they insisted the prison officials had no right to read or try and shut down their civil talk session. It seems no slander was directed towards these officers, but simply some outside opinions, but they would have none of it.
This tracking of people outside of work is wrong. What you do, and your freedom of speech and anonymity should be conserved while on the Internet. To be sure you aren’t being tracked or followed online, use a change IP proxy, and change your IP address to throw off any potential interlopers.
Stephanie Erickson Says:
I love FaceBook! I don’t know though… sometimes it seems dangerous how much information people put on their profiles though, like one of my friends has her pretty much full address. The people who you randomly befriend too can all view your profile, and who actually denies friend requests on a social networking site? This completely negates the argument that some of my friends make when they say that they only put information on their profile cause only their friends can see it. I don’t know… it still seems dangerous though, and I’m sure a good hacker would have no problem actually breaking through those flimsy security measures or actually hacking into someone’s profile. I used to be completely ignorant of the impoprtance of privacy on the Internet, but after looking at these proxy websites and reading how benficial they are I have turned around. I use a change IP proxy now every time I get online and the best thing is they are really cheap and easy to use. Sometimes you can even load sites quicker too, like FaceBook loads a lot faster for me now that I use the IP changer and on top of that I am completely anonymous and invisible online and no one can track me!