In this post I want to talk about a more personal subject. It is about the privacy that I gave up when I created my facebook account. When I started to use facebook I told myself I would only add people that I talk to and that I trusted with the information that I put on my facebook account. I recently ended a friendship with two of my good friends that lived back at home. Long story-short, at the end we stopped talking because problems at work started to hurt our relationship and the best thing to do was to ignore each other. This weekend I finally decided to erase them off of facebook. Not for revenge or anything but to keep my life private from the “talk” at work. Honestly, people that were not my friends do not have the privilege to know what goes on in my private life. By doing all this I found out that facebook did not take my privacy at all. Instead facebook is there to share what I want to share.
My facebook is there to keep up with my friends and to not lose contact. What I put on facebook is done by my own actions. Facebook does not command you to do anything. It doesn’t force you to put exactly where you are at and what you are doing. I blame the trend that is what makes us want to put the personal things on facebook. If one person does it, the other one does it too, and so on it is like a domino effect. Sometimes things need to happen to realize that the world doesn’t need to know everything. I changed a lot of my facebook to make it more private, like erased pictures, erased friends, and anything else I could to make it personal. Facebook has done a lot of good to our society but at the same time people do not know how they can be safe and private in this social network.
You bring up an interesting point about "trends." Currently, the trend seems to be making personal information relatively public on Facebook. As you point out, it's important to remember that we can always refuse to participate in the trend and to censor the information that we make available through our profiles.
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