Returning to Balancing The Public and Private: A Blurring of Boundaries

 
It is interesting to see the ways in which others not only monitor their personal information online, but also how these individuals may use privacy settings to formulate their online identity. Facebook and Twitter appear to be the most popular websites in regards to the both the creation of profiles and the exploitation of social networking.

However, each of these sites utilizes completely different settings for privacy. As mentioned in your comments, Twitter gives you the option to have your profile on private, so that other users are not able to follow you, see your information, or read your tweets without your permission. While there are still aspects of privacy by "protecting" your tweets, there seems to be a general consensus that Twitter is "less invasive" compared to Facebook, because individuals are not giving out as much personal information on their profiles, or posting extensive amounts of other information (mainly due to the 140 character limit).

Facebook on the other hand, makes use of a variety of privacy settings. This is most likely due to the fact that the site prompts you to give out more personal information in comparison to Twitter. With Facebook you are able to customize your privacy settings for different levels of interaction. For example, if I do not want complete strangers contacting me (i.e., people who are not “friends of friends”), I am able to disallow them from searching my profile by name.

As well, I am able to filter specific posts or information to specific groups of people. For example, if there is a certain photo or status that I want to post only for my group of “close friends” I am able to only allow this specific group viewing privileges, while such posts would remain as nonexistent to other Facebook contacts.

It is interesting to note the way in which these types of privacy settings may allow “sub personalities” to develop. If you are filtering specific information to specific groups of people, then you are actively selecting and building an image of how you would like others to view you.

This creation of one’s online image goes beyond these privacy settings set up by such sites as Twitter and Facebook, and into the hands of the individual. While everything is posted in real time, users are still able to retract tweets or posts from being seen. I personally delete tweets almost instantly after I tweet them if I spot a spelling or grammatical error. With Facebook, people are able to untag or “hide” photos from their profile if they deem them to be unflattering.

Thus, it is becoming more and more clear the way in which individuals who use these popular social networking sites are constantly building and monitoring their online identity.

Thank you to those who commented!