W10 : Privacy and surveillance.

« […] online communication tools transform society and our social relations. » (Fuchs 2010). Fuchs started his paper pointing this relevant fact. This is the reason he analysed Social Network Sites (SNS) in general. Several SNS appeared these last ten years, but it is obvious that Facebook became the most famous one, specially among teenagers. These kinds of websites have an important impact on the youth, and the way they manage their profile and their privacy settings is particular. First of all, why did Facebook become such influent in the web sphere ? just because of, according to Danah boyd and Heszter Hargittai, “[…] its positioning as a campus-oriented service” (Facbook Privacy Settings : Who cares ? 2010). That was a smart idea, to involve the young generation in this amazing project, and the most intelligent point was the will to create simply a network between all these students. Then two questions are coming up : what about the privacy ? and what about the surveillance ? Compare to the others SNS, the main idea was to gather all users with a public profile. Hence most of them could see the other one’s profile, when they were becoming friends, and then, they started to sneak a look to personal data. This attitude generated fears and suspicion. Who am I going to trust ? On the first side, surveys showed that different use of privacy exist between different generations. This could be use as a social analysis, because as Furchs says in his paper is that students, or the young generation have a really critical point of view about everything. That is why most of the time this group of people is targeted by the social networking. Then what ? How is the best way for us to manage our own privacy ? Let’s talk in general. If we stick to the Facebook’s history of privacy, this platform knew so many changes. They did it because they had to ameliorate the website, but we shouldn’t forget their main goal is to collect data. So each section of the website is dedicated to provide it. Your profile is automatically public, which means that you have to get involve into your profile to make it private. Again, when they do let you the choice to become an impenetrable kingdom of Facebook or to let you eaten by lurkers. A distinction between male and female could be notice about their management of their privacy, just because of one thing : safety or technopanic attributed by Marwick in 2008. One thing that is obvious, privacy is strongly linked to surveillance. The only fact that differentiates it is : privacy basically concerns the owner of the profile whereas surveillance contains several levels. By different level, I mean that is you are involved into the diffusion of your private data, also the others (friends, companies, groups) could keep your profile under surveillance.