About My Term Research Paper

Facebook was the social networking site that people visit the most frequently. Statistics show that average people spend 55 minutes per day on Facebook. Nowadays, the social networking site play an important role in people's daily life. It provides an opportunity to have an expansive view of the world and its people. That is to say, the social networking sites have changed our life to a large degree. As a member of the Internet generation, I myself is interested about the Internet issues. One of the Internet issues, which I believe is the root of other problems, is loss of privacy. That is why I want to do a research paper about privacy issue. From my research, I learned that social networking sites elicit participants give out their personal information by requiring them to fill out online profile. As an unlimited international community, social network makes those information spread to anywhere around the world. In other words, social networking is a purposeful loss of privacy. Even though Facebook allow users to change their privacy settings, it is not enough to protect your privacy. There are information revealed both knowingly and unknowingly by the participants. Even your friend list can tell information about you more than you thought. In fact, most people do not pay attention to their online privacy unless there is something bad happened.

As Gross, Heinz III and Acquisti concluded, “the easiness of joining and extending one’s network, and the lack of basic security measures (such as SSL logins) at most networking sites make it easy for third parties (from hackers to government agencies) to access participants’ data without the site’s direct collaboration”. And what more, study also shows that through information assembling, it is possible to create a picture about one's identity, "sometimes down to the Social Security number” (Lohr, pars. 4).

To protect privacy online is not an easy task. It is hard to balance legislation and freedom of speech. We could use law to regulate the virtual world, it works well only when apply to the illegal invasion of privacy, such as identity theft. When comes to cases that break no laws, the more law interfere, the less freedom of speech users would have. The surveillance of users’ online activities would be a lot more bother. People could hardly rely on legislation to solve the privacy issue. Do not have the expectation to have both absolutely freedom of speech and privacy online at the same time. There is no absolute freedom. Freedom always comes with responsibilities. If you want the freedom to post whatever you liked, you’d have to accept the possible consequence. It is you who need to take the most of responsibility of what you put on your social networking page and who you reveal your privacy to. The best way to keep your privacy from unknown number of people is do not put it online.