Final Blog: Transparency

Chapter 9 highlights the importance of transparency in the online social media world. The book describes how shifts in privacy policies “have produced similar audience backlashes” by referring to a Facebook upset that occurred in early 2009 (Pavlik, 2011). A change in their privacy policy, which went unnoticed, caused an enormous uproar by users and caused a threat by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. In order to to come around from this incident Facebook created a group where users could discuss future privacy policies. Although this was an affective group, the book notes how Facebook would have been much smarter if they had a group like that to begin with. That way they wouldn’t have had the reaction they did when changing policies. This shows how it important it is to be careful of what you put on the internet and realize that many companies often reach of the lines of privacy, whether you know it or not. The online world is tricky because there is no clear line as to what information cannot only be found out about you from the digital trail that you leave, but what companies know and may or may not use against your own knowledge.