The Online Reflector

Social media give people an opportunity to talk to their friends, family and colleagues.  However, privacy settings exist for people who want to prevent strangers from looking at their profile. Facebook is one of the many social networking websites that allow users to make their profile private. In fact,  privacy settings on Facebook recently made headlines on Dec. 6 after a glitch caused Facebook users’ pictures to be made public.

“The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user’s most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos,” Facebook announced in a statement. “This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.”

According to Consumer Reports, in 2011, 66 percent of adults did not know that privacy settings existed on Facebook. Through his experience at the Help Desk, Technical Support Lead Michael Smiley has found that many students, and even faculty and staff members, do not use privacy settings on a lot of social media applications.

“Most people either don’t know how to set up the privacy settings and most of the time they just think that as long as they have a password that everything should be secure,” Smiley said.

Sophomore nursing major Jordyn Keele, an athlete on the track and field team,  said  she keeps her photos and statuses private.

“I use Facebook as a socializing tool, and I do not post things that would cause me to be at risk,” Keele said.  “Whatever I post, I post for my safety not because of my sports.”

Smiley said that people must think about who may see certain pictures or statuses before posting anything online.

“General rule of thumb is ‘What would my parents think if they saw this status or these pictures?’” he said.  “Nowadays companies are looking at people’s Facebook pages as part of the interviewing process.”

Smiley said that using privacy settings can protect people from outside threats.

“With the advances in WiFi and hotspots, people get on the WiFi in airports or  coffee shops.” Smiley said.  “You don’t necessarily know what security measures they have at these particular places.”

Smiley advises students, faculty and staff to be very cautious about what they post online if they are going out of town for the holidays.

“I definitely wouldn’t volunteer information on where you are going, specific dates and how long you will be gone,” Smiley said.  “To me, I would probably not volunteer anything until I got back.

Smiley is trying to plan a social media presentation for next semester.

“I like to put out things that help [students] as far as [social media] security,” Smiley said.