Ethical considerations of using social media

The advancement in technology and social media in the past decade has grown hugely, especially in the past few years. This sudden surge of online networking and socialising has raised a whole new series of concerns about many things ranging from ethical protection to data misuse. Many of these popular social media sites have come under fire in the past for not paying attention to these issues, or deliberately making it difficult to keep users privacy.

Being so easy to post something out into the internet, where it truly is never gone, is where issues arise. This makes active users, especially ones that are unfamiliar with the sites or how to protect themselves, more vulnerable to being targeted by anyone. They can be easily searched by their profiles, where phone numbers, emails, location and photos are not hard to find from there.

Some ethical issues include:

- Privacy

- Data Leakage

- Identity Theft

- Free Speech

Privacy comes hand-in-hand with many of the other ethical issues. Recently Facebook has come under fire for breaking many if these ethical issues. It was discovered they were invading users privacy and leaking data to third party companies to target advertisements and meant users could download their friends entire contact lists and other confidential data.

In June 2013, Facebook revealed that they had exposed six million users’ personal details to unauthorized viewers over the past year. They blamed the data leaks on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information, which is collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide. This caused huge uproar and many chose to completely remove their accounts from the sites in hopes to clear this.

Identity theft is also a huge issue. In June 2012 Facebook reported that there are around 699 million on average daily active users, However, it is also reported that there are more than 76 million fake users claimed by Facebook during their war campaign to fight bogus accounts. Even with their campaign, many believe not enough is being done to protect peoples details and identity.