If we weren’t to have any mutual friends, none of you would of been able to find me on Facebook. Searching my name on Facebook would of return over 100 results and over 67,000 results on Google – it’s sometimes quite useful having an extremely common name (and another times not, miraculously someone with the same name went to my sixth form and emails never got sent to the right person – nightmare!). Although the first person who added me on Facebook at uni had to use a permalink to find me, and whilst I don’t appear to be that visible online, there’s probably too much information about me online.
Whilst I’m very aware of my online prescience at this moment in time, when I first signed up for Facebook back in 2008, I wasn’t clued up at all about online safety and shared all sorts of rubbish on the lowest privacy setting. Every time I get a notification from Facebook’s ‘On This Day’, I cringe so hard at the rubbish I posted and tend to delete it or change the privacy setting to ‘Only Me’.
I’d like to think my information is under my control, my Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are locked down, whereas my Twitter and Linkedin are not. The latter are not locked down because I purposely use these platforms to interact with the public. But at the end of the day, no matter how in control we think we are, someone can screenshot your content and re-upload it somewhere else for the entire world to see.
Network Society and the Media 
I think you make a good point that once we upload personal information onto the internet, we cannot be certain who has access to it. I have always avoided entering my mobile from social media accounts to retain some privacy but I gave up my postcode for Hotmail/MSN a long time ago. Who knows what databases our personal information is logged for and for what reasons?
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I completely agree with you on the last point you made. Once we upload something, we have to be aware that there’s a high chance our information ends up anywhere in the world, really. Especially, if we haven’t “cleaned up” our list of friends. It’s good that some people realised that their privacy is actually endangered and started taking measures to secure their profiles. For instance, I came across an article named 6 TIPS TO SPRING CLEAN YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS’ LIST.
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