They're Watching You

As social networking sites become more and more popular, producers are finding better ways to encourage users to share their personal lives with the world.  This enables authorities to more easily watch our every move.  It is as though we have given them the password to all of our personal information.  If someone were interested enough, they could discover information regarding someone's gender, birthday, religion, age, family relationships, education, hobbies, friends, location, and ethnicity just by reading someone's past tweets on twitter.  This could be turned into either a good or a bad situation.  Most people would think this would be an invasion of personal privacy, but that is if it weren't for the fact that people voluntarily post this information for the world to see.  However, people need to be aware that if they don't want their personal life being open to the public, they shouldn't post it online. On the other hand, free access to unlimited information like this can benefit society under the circumstances that this information is used for research.  Public information can be collected and studied, to find patterns that may help in finding solutions to problems.  An example of this would be to watch people that show signs of abusing drugs and find out what may cause this or find correlations to prevent it in the future.  It is not necessarily a bad thing for people to post information online or for others to be able to see it, as long as they are mindful of who could access it or what may come of it.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/23/tech/social-media/web-1984-orwell-cashmore/index.html