Protecting privacy, and especially social privacy, is not an easy feat. It is a delicate and continuous task. The variety of social media applications that are available today, and the heterogeneous nature of social media consumers, lessen the ability to suggest one solution to fit all.

Educating users to be privacy literate is not merely making them realize that online personal privacy encompasses much more than formal record protection; nor that information which is shared during social interaction may harm privacy.

It is creating the essential understanding of what may become of this information online; the fact that loose boundaries exist as to the retention and use of the data, and the proactive choice of a desired level of privacy. Privacy literacy will have to be re-evaluated against users’ perception of online information sharing, and refined with time and changes in online social interaction, especially where locative services are used.

Behavior patterns that could not have been foreseen a decade ago, such as voluntary exposure of personal images and locative information, are now prevalent and necessitate different privacy literacy skills.

Future research would address the issue of shifting privacyliteracy paradigms within social media, and especially mobile-social-media, as well as examine specific educational programs that will help make users privacy literate.

Tags: SEM, Social Media Optimization

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 3:09 am and is filed under Social Media Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.