A recent news story regarding Facebook was published in an online version of a newspaper. But this time, it was not the company who was in the spotlight. Instead, it was about one among its millions of users. It featured a former student being reported by a faculty member of a local high school and, consequently, apprehended by law enforcers. The offense involved making threats to bomb the school. It was not even an ordinary threat; it was a Facebook threat. Indeed, making death threats online has long been part of the long list of cyber crimes, which a man or a woman is capable of making. I still remember another woman who made an apparent warning to get back at one of her colleagues in another friends’ so-called ‘wall’. Of course, this mother of two never planned to kill her colleague or anybody for that matter. But the next day, she was fired by her employer, alleging breach of code of conduct. Her boss must’ve been snooping on the activities of all their employees!
Whether to protect ourselves from other violent netizens’ wicked intentions or simply to avoid being spied illegally, it would be in our best interests to protect our much-needed privacy. Sometimes, it can even just be as simple as taking the time and effort to read the privacy policies of the site, and tweaking your, say, Bebo settings to the maximum privacy protection it can offer. Other times, it requires us to be prudent like avoiding seemingly fun yet unknown Myspace or Facebook applications that sometimes force you to give up your identity and all, just to use their program for your enjoyment. That said, it does need two to tango or, more accurately, two to be protected – the one running the sites and you, the user.
