The creation of sites like Facebook, many people are giving their personal information out on the internet. Most users are not aware that they can modify the privacy settings and unless they modify them, their information is open to the public. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have grown popular by broadcasting status updates featuring personal information such as location. Some applications border on “cyber stalking.” This has redefined the role of Internet privacy as overlapping with that of security. Some applications are explicitly centered on “cyber stalking.” An application named “Creepy” can track a person’s location on a map using photos uploaded to Twitter or Flickr. When a person uploads photos to a social networking site, others are able to track their most recent location. Some smart phones are able to embed the longitude and latitude coordinates into the photo and automatically send this information to the application. Anybody using the application can search for a specific person and then find their immediate location. This poses many potential threats to users who share their information with a large group of followers. The most vulnerable victims of private-information-sharing behavior are preteens and early teenagers. There have been age restrictions put on numerous websites but how effective they are is debatable. The illegal activities on Facebook are very wild, especially “phishing attack” which is the most popular way of stealing other people’s passwords. The Facebook users are led to land on a page where they are asked for their login information, and their personal information is stolen in that way. Twitter allows people to share information with their followers. Any messages that are not switched from the default privacy setting are public, and thus can be viewed by anyone with a Twitter account. The most recent 20 tweets are posted on a public timeline. This occurs when friends of someone with a private account retweet, or copy and paste, that person’s tweet and so on and so forth until the tweet is made public. Another issue involving privacy on Twitter deals with users unknowingly disclosing their information through tweets. 

HIRA SHEHZAD,  

Karachi, May 4.