Online Identity

Having an online identity is a social idenity in which online communities can recognise you, the content which you should choose to put is entirely up to you. Creating an online identity can give the user a different perpective on social networking sites. These identies can be used maliciously i.e. pedophiles to create make belief characters in which young children can talk to.

It is reported that there are countless underage users on facebook who dont actually meet the criteria of being over the age of 14. So as soon as they start communicating there are immediately breaking facebooks privacy policy.

“Facebook began life as a way of keeping US college students in touch with each other. Devised by Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg, the site now accounts for 1% of all net traffic and is the sixth most visited site in the US

The social networking site is thought to have about 39 million members. Numbers have jumped since the firm removed the need to have an academic e-mail address in September 2006.” - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6980454.stm

From this something so harmless has been built into everyday life. Facebook ha now come to the point where they want to discreetly create revenue without annoying the users for example when someone list their favourite movie as Spiderman they could get a video trailer sent to them for X-Men.

So it would seem that facebook want to give their advertisers more opportunities to target individuals according to their interests, this inevitably conflicting with the users privacy.

When obtaining private data from a user this can be known as phishing. The first documented use of the word “phishing” took place in 1996. Most people believe it originated as an alternative spelling of “fishing,” as in “to fish for information.”