In today's culture of sharing, we need to pay greater attention to privacy and security. While many people share a lot of their private information on social media networks, very few are educated about privacy.
This is according to Andy Hadfield, founder of Real Time Wine, who spoke at ITWeb's Social Media Summit, on Tuesday.
Hadfield said that, today, many people share everything online. For example, he said, many parents open social media accounts for their children as soon as they are born. Some people even start blogs for their babies, and register domain names for their children.
Hadfield also pointed out that Facebook has just enabled a feature that lets people update their profiles to “expecting”. However, he warned that if this data is on their public profiles, it allows people to target expecting parents.
“We live in a world where what happens in Vegas stays on Facebook,” warned Hadfield. He also stressed that people are uploading an incredible volume of data onto an Internet that “never forgets”.
Hadfield also noted that many people share their locations on Foursquare. Moreover, he pointed out that many smartphones share the user's location by default every time the user updates a status or shares a photo on a social media network.
According to Hadfield, this is incredible, but also very scary. He pointed out that looking at someone's social media profile and location updates can give a fairly good idea of where they live.
Hadfield warned that the consequences of not understanding privacy today will manifest tomorrow.
He suggested it is the user's responsibility to understand privacy, while businesses that collect private data need to be responsible in how they use that data.
Normalising bad behavior
According to Hadfield, the current generation is one that shares their experiences, whether these are embarrassing or not.
He added that people do not necessarily behave worse than they did in the past, but because of the Internet, people are not as good at hiding it.
The danger, according to Hadfield, is that when behavior is widely seen, for example in photos on Facebook, it become normalised.
Hadfield warned that people need to be careful about this, because it can result in society losing its moral compass.
Dangerous game
Hadfield also warned that social media is incredibly addictive. When people comment on photos a user has shared, or like his or her status, the user experiences a rush of human connectivity. However, he warned, this feeling disappears when the user's next status update is ignored.
He likened social media to an experiment involving a rat. In the experiment, when the rat hit a lever, a pellet was dispersed. In this scenario, the rat would hit the lever whenever it was hungry. However, said Hadfield, the experiment was repeated, but with a pellet only sometimes being dispersed when the rat hit the lever. The result was that the rat kept hitting the lever.
For this reason, he argued that, like the rat, people using social media never know when they will get a pellet, in the form of a 'like' or comment on their Facebook status.
Hadfield therefore argues that social media is a dangerous and addictive game. He says this uncertainty is what makes social media addictive, and it is because of this addiction that social media is experiencing such rapid growth.
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