My Experience With Communication Technologies

I am constantly using communication technologies to stay in contact with friends and family. The most popular ways for me is calling and texting on my iPhone, through facebook and on skype. I've been using my phone since about 2006, and social media since about 2008. At the beginning, my main motive to having these things was because all my friends had them, and I wanted to follow the crowd. But now, I use these things because I have to, they are absolutely essential to my daily life.

Websites such as facebook have revolutionized the way we can stay in contact with friends, and it has also provided an innovative platform for business marketing. This, however, has sparked a plethora of issues. Privacy issues is the most dangerous at the moment concerning facebook users. The information uploaded by users is tattooed onto the database, and many businesses can access every piece of information we upload and then target users accordingly. Even employers can track facebooks and fire staff if they find displeasing information. And what is most concerning to me is the fact that user-deleted content is never erased from facebook itself; there will always be a server-sided copy on the cache system that facebook has the rights to pass on to any of its partners for business purposes (Whittaker, 2010). See for yourself; upload a picture on facebook, copy the URL for that picture someplace, delete the photo, and although the picture may not appear on your profile, the URL still takes you straight to that photo.

Therefore, I strongly advice that people use more discernment when using sites that require personal information. I love facebook and being able to keep in touch with all my friends, but it is also so dangerous, and can lead to things like scamming, cyber-bullying and privacy invasion.

References

Whittaker, Z. 2010. 'Facebook does not erase user-deleted content'. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/facebook-does-not-erase-user-deleted-content/4808 (accessed 10th August 2012)