Obviously there are a number of privacy concerns which must be tackled with when creating a social networking service and there are a number of laws which we must be aware of in this regard. Especially with kind of crazy articles like this one calling for all social media status’ to be delayed and approved before going live…
Social networking sites are websites where people can meet, chat and share their information but sometimes they are not aware of the vulnerability that it offers when they do such things. Users have a role to play in protecting their own privacy.
There are various types of social networking sites and most of them have the common idea of sharing your personal information which might be in the form of profiles that you make on those sites. The popularity of these sites prevails just because it allows information sharing with so many people. But the users must be aware of the consequences of the data they share about themselves, so it is always better to trust in sites that gives the user to choose their own privacy settings.
Let’s take the example of Facebook. It is not just a site for sharing information across friends but it is also a site where the information is shared across enhanced application and websites. But they do such activities only with the consent of the users. There are various features of the current social networking sites, one of them is tagging. As our project concentrates on this particular aspect, it is necessary for us to determine the privacy issue that a user has to face while using such features.
From the privacy point of view, tagging is one of the concepts where a user can wish to publish the information about a third person on his/her profile without having the consent of that user who is tagged. This dissemination of information is quite problematic in various cases. If the tagged person is also a user of the same social networking service then he is allowed to remove the tag but he/she is not allowed to remove the picture, however if the person is not a member of the same social networking site then he/she will not be able to remove the tag as well. The situation becomes more complicated when any other user of the social networking service tags some other user’s photo. In regards to these, the data protection principle requires the person who is on a picture should give their consent before they get tagged or even if their photo is uploaded. The violation of this would be interpreted as a breach of the obligations of the data controller under the European data protection legislation. Currently social networking sites allow the distribution of information about other users without their consent which needs refinement of the legal obligations and rights of the users of social networking sites.
The European Data Protection legislation is the body that is responsible for protecting the users against unlawful processing of their information. A European commission is set up on 2008 named as European Social Networking Task Force in the context of its safer internet programme (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/sip/index_en.htm). They have set some guidelines and currently 17 social networking sites are following this, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.