Social Networking sites have had a number of positive and negative effects on society since their inception. These two articles really show the full spectrum of their effect in that they explore different areas of society: your work life and your personal identity.
The "Business Side" of Life
This article, titled "Ten Cultural Implications of Social Software", states ten major changes in societal patterns as a direct result of the popularity of Web 2.0 technology. This article is worded very formally, definitely written to be read from a business perspective. Further proof of this fact is that all ten of the effects listed in this article refer to some type of business relationship. For example, It states that things you post online that are written poorly can have an effect on your job search, because the number of companies that hire illiterates are shrinking. Also, posting online in a blog about your industry could increase or decrease a potential employer's view of your professional competence, depending on your knowledge.
It also stated major changes in the way businesses market products. Beta Testing, or a release of a version of a product to a small community for testing, has been invaluable to many. It allows the "bugs" of the project to be discovered before the finished product is shipped.
Clearly, positive and negative effects exist here.
Dangerous Security Risks
The second article, titled "Social Networking 'Addiction' Aids Phishing", describes a new wave of crime that uses data from social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace to gather the personal information of others. This act, called phishing, can effectively allow criminals to reverse engineer your identity profile, or commit identity theft. Information that used be lulled out of unsuspecting consumers of products such as AOL (their passwords, pretending to be AOL employees) used to steal their identity can now be found posted on a website by the victim's free will. Sites like Facebook and Myspace in this way act as a "one stop-shop" for Phishers and Identity thieves.
Here is a perfect example. A phisher used to send you a spam mail that read like this :
This is a Citibank Employee. Please verify account information for security purposes.
If you couldn't differentiate this from a genuine email from Citibank, you could give away your credit card information to an identity thief. Now consider the possibilities granted a phisher when he goes to your Myspace, assuming you're bad at being safe online...
He gets your cell number, or an address. For a small fee, many online services exist for tracking down full names, other phone numbers and living locations based off of less information. Possibly one could gain pictures of you he can scan to a good fake ID. A brief view of any blog entries might give him the knowledge of where you will be certain days. How would you feel coming home to an empty house? This article brings up a severe danger to having more of our lives posted on the internet.
The first article seemed fairly straight forward to me. The information that I put on the internet can effect my Job Search. This is knowledge I have been force-fed in the last few months. It was the second article that truly scared me. Have you noticed on the lower right of your browsers, you users of Internet Explorer 7, that you have a Phishing Filter? This is searching for the legitimacy of the sites you visit. I have turned this off before!! This article gave me a reason to research what phishing really was, and it has definitely furthered my cause in reducing the information held on these social networking sites. In an earlier post, I mentioned my mother is now a blogger. I didn't mention it in the post, but my mother had posted her full address and a picture of herself on her blog at Blogger.com. I have told her to take it down, because it is quite frankly a security risk. This article is more fuel to the fire.