Last month Facebook hit a staggering 500,000,000 users, so clearly it’s no longer just tech savvy youths that are getting comfortable with the idea of sharing details of their private lives online. The way that we communicate has changed at breakneck speed over the last few years as a result of new technology, but is this communication revolution actually making our lives better?
These days most people use email, texts and the internet on a daily basis when only a few years ago we were all perfectly happy with the humble telephone. The vast majority of people I know would argue that on the whole, technology has made their lives more efficient. Can anyone remember the last time they wrote an actual letter, on real writing paper?! It’s not often these days that we’re asked to write much more than a signature in day to day life, so when I was asked to fill in a rather long form at the doctors’ surgery recently it made me realise how my dexterity on a keyboard had come at the expense of my once-legible handwriting. But it’s not just handwriting that’s suffering in our new ‘always online’ world...
In a very short space of time people have got very comfortable in sharing their photo’s, thoughts, plans and experiences online with their closest (and also quite often their most distant) friends. Much has been written about Facebook’s privacy issues over the last year or so and the company has recently bowed to pressure to review its default privacy settings to make it more obvious to new members exactly what they are agreeing to share with the online community; seemingly people either didn’t care about the fact that intimate personal details about their lives were available to all and sundry, or they just didn’t know what was being shared online. Either way, it shows a naivety about the internet and the privacy issues it brings with it which is worryingly commonplace.
What makes this even more concerning is that technology has brought a new social networking phenomenon that is currently building momentum and it takes this lack of privacy to new and even more worrying levels. ‘Geosocial’ devices, which are essentially internet enabled smartphones with GPS built-in have been around for a while now, but the software to make use of the technology is now starting to appear and so are the users. ‘Foursquare’ is an application designed to be used predominately on smartphones such as the iPhone and Google’s Android platform that brings together the existing dominant social networks of Facebook and Twitter and adds the extra dimension of location to them. So, a Foursquare user that might Tweet that they are out having a meal with a friend would also have the location of the restaurant revealed online. There are certainly positive aspects to this kind of location tagging such as being able to read about other people’s experiences and thoughts about a particular place – ‘if you’re eating here then check out their fabulous BLT sandwich’ – for example... Broadcasting information about what you are doing is one thing, but pinpointing your exact location at the same time to anyone who might like to know strikes me as downright scary - whether you’re a stalker, a burglar or the local oddball, Geosocial devices and software are a dream come true!
In June, Webroot, a Denver-based internet security firm, surveyed 1,645 users of “geo-location-ready mobile devices”, including 624 in the UK: 29% said they shared their location with people other than their friends; 31% said they accepted a friend request from a stranger; and, yet, 55% still said they were worried about their loss of privacy.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this technology and the companies that are developing it are policed over the coming months and years, as our appetite for social media grows and we become less and less concerned about the personal information we expose to others online.
The author James Ratcliffe is a friend of LIVING WITHIN and Director of Homeplay Ltd, 87a High Street, Esher, Surrey, KT10 9QA. Telephone 01372 476783 or email – james@homeplay.tv