There are plenty of features being offered by social networking sites (SNS) which include making your profile, finding people with mutual interests, sharing with your circles or groups, interacting with people in your groups and getting the information shared by other people. This is where issues come in. With the rise of Online Social Networking, the ethical dilemmas are growing in number including violation of privacy, misrepresentation, bullying and creepiness. When we are getting the facility of relatively unrestricted social communications, we are becoming more vulnerable to deception and scams too at the same time which has become the reason of attention for Social Networking Ethics. Few ethical dilemmas faced when we use social networks. I listed three ethical issues we have to consider before we divulge our personal information in social networks.
First, Privacy. I think that social networks somehow takeaway our right to priv If the actions that break the law or terms of privacy of any user of social network harms that individuals personal or professional credibility should be considered unethical. I always experience being asked to fill up forms that require my personal information.
There is also an issue on Identity Theft. Identity theft is one from many examples of ethical issues in social networking. It is a form of technique used by criminals to impersonate someones identity with intention to pursue or commit for crime. The victim will be hold to be responsible for the consequences of fraud or action done the impersonators. Identity theft on the Internet can arise in two similar yet distinct ways which are either creating a fake account or stealing and hacking the password of the victim.
In previous Facebooks regulatory filing released on 2012, the social media company said that 8.7 percent (83.09 million) of its 955 million monthly active users worldwide are actually duplicate or false accounts.
Despite of rapid and aggressive effort made by social networking sites to secure and protect its users from any form of online impersonation, the solution is still depends on the ethical value and proactive action from the users themselves to fully developed good understanding and self-awareness on the risk of online impersonation in social networking sites.
And, the most critical is the issue on Free Speech. We may think that using social networks is something private where can express anything we want to but we are not as private as they think. Disparaging your competitors in SNS (social networking sites) is considered unethical because of its broad range of negative impacts. Once you have posted something, it is not yours anymore and it can go viral as fast as a fire in the forest without asking for your permission which then cant only affect your reputation but also the person or company you were disparaging about, so much.
The aforesaid ethical issues should be taken into account because as soon as we sign up for any social media accounts, we are already one click away from being harmed. So, we should all keep ethics in front of us even while using social media.
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