When I first signed up for a Facebook account, it was to stay connected with my cross country team and merely thought Facebook was a means of sharing pictures and an alternative way of contacting people other than via email. I saw maybe child pornography as a risk and the benefits almost limitless. I was pro-Facebook.
Now after reading the article and getting actual information from the class, I am completely against Facebook and at the point of deleting my own if I cannot make it do some basic functions without completely opening my ways of communicating pictures and text to friends but mostly family. With how much advertizing and how much revenue Facebook makes off advertising, I am partially sickened to know that I am basically using a website that wants to drain me of every dollar I make by using my “personal information” against me.
What truly got me was how insecure Facebook was, a friend of mine had her Facebook hacked by her boss to check her online profile. Taken into a different situation, someone hacks your Facebook account and has the notion to completely trash you by posting horrible comments and the like. I focus on the comments and posts because the written word has a lot of power. Dr. Preston proved this point by giving our class the example of a senator who a journalist didn’t like. The journalist posted junk about that senator online and then flooded Google with searches about that one item which resulted in changing the fill in algorithm for that guy’s name to only show that bad incident. I highly doubt that the senator in question had a good time finding a job after that. I now see Facebook as a potent online weapon for even rudimentary hackers. Destroying a person’s reputation used to be hard because they had to commit faux pases to get them. Now all one has to do is destroy a person’s online profile and one has destroyed the person by using the “hard” evidence of the written word from a very insecure online profile that can be broken into and sabotaged. This is all the based off the new information I read from the article and from the discussion in my class.
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