The myth of online privacy: if you are on social media, consider yourself exposed

Do any of you remember Friendster? Of course you don’t. I’m an “old,” so I have fond memories of being apart of one of the first large-scale social networking platforms that began in the early aughts. Friendster and MySpace are now defunct, or close to it, replaced by a dozen other social sites, with Facebook as the reigning champion with over one billion accounts worldwide. My old Friendster account is archived online and can be analyzed in a variety of ways, just as yours is today.

As a college student in 2017, you are probably apart of at least one of these social networking sites. You may think your profile is fully private (please adjust your settings if it’s wide open – employers can and will look you up!), but the truth is that if you have friends online, certain kinds of information about you can be gathered, even if you aren’t on Snapchat or IG.

If you’re interested in media studies and would like to write about “social media” as a contemporary phenomenon, consider privacy issues. Read the article below and see what you think.

On social media, privacy is no longer a personal choice

Social networks can make predictions about people, based on information from their friends

BY

BETHANY BROOKSHIRE

AUGUST 24, 2017

……..“It’s a good illustration of an issue we have in society, which is that we no longer have control over what people can infer about us,” says Elena Zheleva, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “If I decide not to participate in a certain social network, that doesn’t mean that people won’t be able to find things about me on that network.”

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Institutional Repository

The Macdonald-Kelce Library now has a new Institutional Repository (IR) online! The UT IR mission is to collect, preserve, and distribute the intellectual output of the UT community. Many universities have an IR in order to store and preserve materials such as theses, dissertations, university publications, faculty papers, conference proceedings, and college events, and make them accessible to the world.

What you’ll find now in the IR is a collection of past MFA Theses (most are campus-access restricted), and materials from a conference hosted here at UT.

In the future the Library hopes to collect more scholarship created by you, whether you are a student, faculty, or staff. Keep up with the progress of the IR by visiting the library’s homepage at utopia.ut.edu, and reading this blog!

Learn more about the IR on our guide: http://libguides.utopia.ut.edu/thesis

Explore the IR here: https://utampa.dspacedirect.org/