Within contemporary society, it has become more common and socially acceptable to expose personal information online. This personal information might be anything that can be used to identify a person, such as age, gender, name, marital status, hometown, pictures, family members etc. However, most would like to avoid unwanted contact with those that could potentially harass or harm them with said information. But even thought they might be conscious of the negative consequences of sharing substantial information online, they neglect measures that would keep this data more private. Particularly, we explored how easily accesible is the personal information of users on the popular social media website Facebook. We directly targeted our audience for the elaboration of our project, so our group stalked everyone in the class of Phil 123, 1:00pm lecture, on Facebook. With the information we found in this social media platform, we compiled data and exposed personal information that was available from classmates and faculty.
However, we came to the conclusion that merely finding all this information and presenting it was not enough to get people to understand the dynamics of our projects. So, we interviewed numerous individuals in the class and asked them a series of personal questions that were found on their Facebook page. With uncomfortable responses, we then asked them if they felt as if their privacy was violated.
Through the interviews and graphs, we then went into depth on privacy and how society currently has a conceptual vacuum over privacy in association with social media. Overall, the general point of our project was to show people that they cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy if they are willingly and openly posting a majority of their personal information on Facebook. We then hoped that the audience would realize that if their personal information is available to the public, anybody is able to access it and use it as they wished. Therefore, the main takeaway from our presentation was to make people take the necessary measures to restrict to whom they want to share their personal information with and change their privacy settings on Facebook.
*If the interviews cannot be viewed on the PDF file, you can view them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDIDLV2RSMg
This project explores internet stalking over Facebook, and how it relates to our conceptions of privacy.