Does social media know more about you than your own parents?

Anyone who has a Facebook profile is probably aware of how increasingly more difficult the privacy settings are to maneuver. Facebook's settings used to seem so simple and you would know exactly where to go if you wanted to block certain people, or make posts private. However, more recently social media users have not found the new settings to be as user friendly. Brooke Nepo goes more in depth about the problems some users are having with Facebook in her blog post on Soshable, "Big Brother Facebook Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself – and They’ll Tell Your Dad."

In her post, Nepo tells a story of student at UT Austin, and how his life was turned upside down when his dad found out about his sexuality over Facebook. The student was looking for a LGBT page on Facebook to somehow get connected on campus with a group of similar students, and because he disregarded his privacy settings, all of Facebook was notified when he accepted an invitation into the group on Facebook. This is just one case of this happening on social media. 

Unfortunately one of the costs of being active on social media is realizing that you are putting easy accessible information on the web for anyone to see. It is important that users are aware of the settings for each post or picture privacy if they are friends with people on Facebook who they do not want to share certain things with. Facebook is making public information more public and private info public as well. The real question is where should the line be drawn? Until then, Facebook and social media users need to be alert and wary of the information they choose to share.