Privacy on social networks

by Peter Bradwell

Just read a story about Oxford University using Facebook to find evidence from their students' photos of banned post-exam partying. It follows lots of stories about employers using information they find on social network sites to inform their recrutiment decisions, or monitor their staff.

One of Facebook's selling points is that users can set levels of privacy, limiting access to photos and the other snippets of information from their profiles to a specific group or groups.  Is it as unethical to actively try to transgress those boundaries on social networks, as it is looking at someone's email, or getting hold of a set of their printed photos?

Does the question of who sees what come down to ownership of your profile, as much as what you decide to put on it?

Duncan O'Leary

Absolutely. I think it's far more helpful to think of privacy as a set of self-determined/negotiated boundaries, which can shift over time, rather than as a set of red lines that can never be crossed. Whether someone has breached my privacy depends on what i see as private. So the question is how you give people control over that, rather than decide it for them.

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