The explosion of social media has opened several doors including growing businesses, staying in touch with family and friends, expressing opinions, etc. While social networks have various benefits, they present privacy threats that are concerning yet unknown to majority of their users. One of the major security threats that derive from posting personal information online on such platforms is our location privacy. Craig Desson discusses this threat coming from social media networks in his article “My Creepy Instagram Map Knows Where I Live” and Sharon Jayson explains the risk dating sites pose to our privacy in her article “Is Online Dating Safe?”

Nowadays, no longer should we say, “it’s a small world” but rather, “it’s a known world”. Our location is accessible to the general public and it’s scarily easy for stalkers to guess where we live with a bit of research based on geo-location data. Craig gives the example of U.S. Congressman Aaron Schock to show how easy it has become to track one’s activities and places visited through Creepy, “a program that will create a Google map showing where you’ve been”. He also experiments himself the validity of his argument by analyzing the map this program produces from his Instagram and concluding, “you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to guess that’s my home”. I think the issue is that social media networks won’t let you create an account if you don’t give them your location. Most people don’t know that by using features on these platforms such as photo sharing, they are exposing their location: “The trouble with Instagram tracking is that most users have no idea their photo-sharing app is also building a detailed history of where they work and live”. The fact that our location can be easily figured out creates a major threat on our security.

The same privacy concern is found with the use of online dating sites. By sharing private information to dating industries, users cannot guarantee the confidentiality of their data. In her article “Is Online Dating Safe?” Sharon shares Sen. Al Franken’s concern to keeping users’ locations confidential: “This is about Americans’ right to privacy and one of the most private things is your location”. Although dating sites conduct background checks on subscribers and give safety tips to their clients, they are not really “explicit in what they do with their data and what they require of users”, according to Rainey Reitman. Once again, users are at a risk of having their location disclosed by using certain features on these websites. Reitman points out that “people don’t realize how much information they’re exposing, even by doing something as slight as uploading a photograph”.

It astonishes me that with the advancement of technology, our privacy is being threatened. Confidential information that we share with important institutions such as banks and health organizations is now readily available to the public with a few buttons to click. If our safety were at risk simply by uploading photos, would sharing pictures of children create more incidents of kidnapping?

Works Cited

Desson, Craig. “My Creepy Instagram Map Knows Where I Live.” The Start newspaper, 27 February 2015

Jayson, Sharon. “Is Online Daring Safe?” USA Today, 27 March 2014.