First impressions tend to leave a mark, good or bad. Facebook strategized well with it's first impression on new users, and the world. When you first sign up to be a member of Facebook, you're doing it for the fun of it! All of your friends and family are users of the site, and it's a great new opportunity to learn new things and catch up with friends. Facebook is a great way to communicate with classmates you have now, or classmates you had years ago in school, see what your friends are up to, keep in contact with family, or even meet new friends. The trouble with Facebook is that we dont really understand the whole aspect of the site. Once you post something online, it is no longer yours. someone could steal your photos or even post unwanted photos of you without your permission. You're essentially inviting people into your personal life without even always realizing it.
There are a lot of young users on Facebook, that don't even have to capability to know about the dangers of being a part of Facebook. As we speak, the creators of this social site and other executives are deliberating on making it illegal to use Facebook if you are under the age of thirteen years old. I dont necessarily think this law will keep kids from being a part of the social site because there are always ways around the system when online. Parents need to be aware of what their children are doing on the internet and enforce parental controls on their computers.
I am a user of Facebook, and after reading the article "Why Facebook Is After Your Kids" I was informed of a lot of things that I had no idea were the case. Facebook is all about advertising. They are careful to put things that you are interested in on your profile, and show others that are interested in the same things who else is interested. It relys strongly on advertising through you and your profile information. You may set your settings to "private", but a month from now they could say, "Oops! Technical difficulties." and your information is now public for anyone to see. When posting things online, you should treat it as if the entire world is going to see it. I upload a lot of photos that I take on my cell phone. I knew when I took a photo that my GPS on my phone tagged the exact location of where I was in the picture. What I didn't know, is that when I upload that photo to Facebook, the rest of the people that can see my profile, can also view the information of my whereabouts.
There is a lot that we need to be aware of when using the interenet. Facebook is not a terrible, identity stealing, life ruining site. Yet, we do need to be careful in what we post, knowing that once it is online, it is no longer in our control.
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