So my good friend Matt wrote an opinion piece about Facebook in the Justice yesterday.
Matt, you makea variety of good points. But I think you’re missing two important pieces of data.
There is a reason people feel that their privacy is invaded. They weren’t the ones taking those pictures of themselves at parties or defacing towns, or whatever. Someone else did, often without their permission. Secondly those pictures have security settings so that only members of “the Network”, aka Brandeis Students, for example, can see them. When the University infiltrates the network and bypasses those security settings, it’s acting in bad faith, and co-opting a fraternal bonding experience into a spying extravaganza.
There was a “counterpoint” article, however. As far I understand, it argued that the contextual advertising for Facebook don’t give us no respect. Well, that’s novel.
Then again, maybe those ads really are an insult to our intelligence. I wouldn’t know.
I agree with you Sahar about where the violation of privacy occurred in terms of the university looking into kids’ facebook accounts, but I think you give us students too much credit on the other point.
I think Matt is right when he says that we students are hypocritical when we complain about the incriminating facebook pictures that our friends post, because we have all been the kid posting those pictures at some point, just as we have all been the one to complain about it. The fact of the matter is that very few people are deleting their profiles just because of the risk involved since nobody thinks that they will ever be the one accused of committing a crime because of facebook evidence.