Privacy

Privacy is a concern for everyone and especially nowadays with new media. New media reveals a lot of personal information about the individual using the platform. Media such as Facebook has a user input their hometown, full name, birth date, school, occupation, etc. to populate their profile and to make it visible to their friends. The first level of privacy comes with Facebook having this information on their end in their servers, if they ever got hacked then this info could become public. Secondly this information can be public on a person's public Facebook profile. Anyone can type in a person's name and basically find where they live and work, this can cause people to stalk other people and even break into their homes. The release of information about an individual is concerning for any type of new media site, Instagram, Twitter, etc. New media such as Instagram also has the possibility of giving too much info to someone who would like to cause harm to the user also. If the user has a public Instagram profile or lets random people follow them on the platform then that said person can find out different personal information about the user. The pictures that someone uploads can reveal the user's family members, what their house looks like and even if they are on vacation, allowing the people who follow them to know they aren't home and to rob them; this last concern can happen on Snapchat also. Using Snapchat a person can upload real-time videos and pictures of what they are doing and where they are at the moment. This can allow people who follow them to know their whereabouts and come to them to cause any type of harm. The concern for privacy is very real while using new media, everyone just has to be careful about how to keep themselves safe.