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Monday, February 16, 2015

ONLINE PRIVACY

Image Source [4]
Online privacy is a broad term referring to the various concerns, technologies, and strategies for protecting information, communications, and choices that are meant to be private. Disclosure of individually identifiable information can occur deliberately or accidentally and can occur within an organization or be the result of an external breach of security. When people post personal information on social network sites, that information may be used in ways they do not realize.

A REAL EXAMPLE OF WHY FACEBOOK PRIVACY IS A PROBLEM : 

OPEN BOOK (SEARCH ENGINE) :

OpenBook is an enhanced search tool for Facebook to find stuff you don’t want people to find out about you, which helps harvests unprotected information that people post on their Facebook pages.

Image Source[3]
Openbook enabled one to search for specific texts on the walls of Facebook subscribers which they had denoted, knowingly or unknowingly, as being available to "Everyone," i.e. to the Internet at large. It was built by San Francisco website developers Will Moffat, Peter Burns and James Home within a few hours on May 12, 2010, and received nearly six million page views in its first two weeks on-line from over a million people in over two hundred countries.

In May 2012, the website was moved from its original domain youropenbook.org to openbook.org. In July 2012, Openbook was shut down due to legal reasons. Facebook itself now provides the same capacity to search Facebook pages for a word or phrase for logged in users.

OpenBook is a powerful statement and illustration for why privacy matters. Perhaps the fault lies with the people who carelessly post potentially embarrassing information about themselves but one cannot deny possible negative repercussions. As employers use the Internet to do background checks and colleges scouring information about potential new students, one cannot be too cavalier about their public or private information.


RESOURCE (EXTERNAL LINKS)

[1] Functioning Open source site - Referred on 2015-02-14
[2] WikiPedia  - Referred on 2015-02-15
[3] Facebook's Privacy concerns - Referred on 2015-02-14
[4] How to Lock down Facebook Privacy - Referred on 2015-02-14

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