Social Networking

Social Networking can be used by everyone from individuals looking to connect to others, to large corporations and businesses to promote their business and even find out what the individual consumer prefers. Individuals can play games, speak about hobbies and share common interest with others, review medical and health information, find and speak about work, and simply socialize with other individuals. These technologies aid in the increased inter-connectivity that we find between people in the modern age of technology which can help people with a common goal come together even if geography or distance separates them physically. If these groups are working towards a positive common goal, then the effect of social networking can be positive but if the common goal of the group of people is malicious, then the effect of social networking can be negative as it is bringing together individuals with harmful intent. Organizations like ISIS are doing exactly that to recruit new and mostly young members to their organization which is arguably malicious towards a large percentage of human kind. This would be an example of how there can be a "dark side" to social networking. In the article "BBB: New Wave of Phishing Scams Uses Facebook Info for Personalized Spam" social networking's "darkside" is again portrayed as it shows that scammers are able to use personal information from Facebook to gain access to your more personal information through malware and viruses by messaging Facebook users as their "friends". They use Facebook pages of individuals to see who is friends with who so that an email is sent that may be considered suspicious is considered normal because of the sender. The article "Facebook Privacy is So Confusing, Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private," shows how sites like Facebook often reveal private information for the whole world to see noting that a relative of the creator of this website's picture was released after she posted a picture of her family for her friends and family to see and this picture was posted to other social networking sites without her blatant consent. To me, this shows that the future of social networking may be social networking with more privacy as more and more scandals like this continue to arise.