Safety, privacy and reputation protection in the digital age
Before we go into detail about Facebook settings, some context on what it
means to socialize and share personal information in a digital media
environment might be helpful. In this section, we’ll provide a bit of that
background. And throughout this guidebook, we’ll highlight some key
parenting points for guiding young social networkers.
7
The meaning of privacy seems to be changing in today’s very social media
environment, and different from when we were children. Researchers say that
people want to control their level of privacy rather than to be either entirely
private (which defeats the whole purpose of socializing online) or entirely
public online.
Sharing photos and information online has become part of how people stay in
touch all over the world. Because using media is now a social experience, it’s
not a solitary activity, it’s a shared or interactive one. And since photos and
videos often depict groups of people, and one person’s content and photos
often appear on other people’s pages and vice versa, safety and privacy in
social media are also a shared experience – a negotiation. One person (your
child or you) simply can’t have complete control over anything he or she posts
online, even when employing the strictest privacy settings.
Safety and Reputation Point: Whatever you post, positive or negative,
can affect your relationships with people, how they feel about you and what
they might say about you to others. We all need to remember that we’re
interacting with people in social networking sites – not text and images –
even though the text and images are much more visible than the people.
Young people’s information-sharing in Facebook is very grounded in their “real
world” relationships, peer groups and school life, research shows, and rarely
with strangers. While that’s very good, sometimes they’re so focused on
friends and peers that they don’t think about how their content can be seen by
or distributed to a much broader audience and be very difficult to take back.
They may need their parents’ help in understanding that it’s almost impossible
to control digital text, photos, video, etc., once it has been shared via phones
and online.
Reputation Point: Even if your child’s privacy settings are specifically set
to Friends Only, there is a possibility that a friend can become an ex-friend
or just try to play a prank on your child by copying and forwarding
information that was meant only for friends. For this reason, it’s important
for users to be extremely careful about what they post online, even among
their friends.
Before we go into detail about Facebook settings, some context on what it
means to socialize and share personal information in a digital media
environment might be helpful. In this section, we’ll provide a bit of that
background. And throughout this guidebook, we’ll highlight some key
parenting points for guiding young social networkers.
7
The meaning of privacy seems to be changing in today’s very social media
environment, and different from when we were children. Researchers say that
people want to control their level of privacy rather than to be either entirely
private (which defeats the whole purpose of socializing online) or entirely
public online.
Sharing photos and information online has become part of how people stay in
touch all over the world. Because using media is now a social experience, it’s
not a solitary activity, it’s a shared or interactive one. And since photos and
videos often depict groups of people, and one person’s content and photos
often appear on other people’s pages and vice versa, safety and privacy in
social media are also a shared experience – a negotiation. One person (your
child or you) simply can’t have complete control over anything he or she posts
online, even when employing the strictest privacy settings.
Safety and Reputation Point: Whatever you post, positive or negative,
can affect your relationships with people, how they feel about you and what
they might say about you to others. We all need to remember that we’re
interacting with people in social networking sites – not text and images –
even though the text and images are much more visible than the people.
Young people’s information-sharing in Facebook is very grounded in their “real
world” relationships, peer groups and school life, research shows, and rarely
with strangers. While that’s very good, sometimes they’re so focused on
friends and peers that they don’t think about how their content can be seen by
or distributed to a much broader audience and be very difficult to take back.
They may need their parents’ help in understanding that it’s almost impossible
to control digital text, photos, video, etc., once it has been shared via phones
and online.
Reputation Point: Even if your child’s privacy settings are specifically set
to Friends Only, there is a possibility that a friend can become an ex-friend
or just try to play a prank on your child by copying and forwarding
information that was meant only for friends. For this reason, it’s important
for users to be extremely careful about what they post online, even among
their friends.
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