Social Networking

Business intelligence has always been something that companies invested heavily on. More so in today's day and age because of all the interactions that people have with Social Media. Social networking is a way for various individuals or groups to interact and meet each other regardless of physical distance. Today's day you may meet a person of a mutual friend that you have never seen or heard of, Social Networking through the internet made this possible. This is where the business intelligence of companies come in. They bring in their Big Data equipment and start collecting the information that we as a society feed it. We may think that we're uploading pictures, posting a status, or checking in to a restaurant. Companies care about this and they want to know what we're interested in. Companies want to know what exactly we're interested in, where we frequently visit, how we spend our time. All of this information is important to these organizations because they can take the data they mine from our day to day activities and come up with algorithms that define us. By giving us a definition they can better market products and services to us because they know exactly who we are and we'll eventually give in to the things they have to offer.

In today's society we don't think too much about things such as privacy because we think that reputable organization's size means their security is equally as big. But what we don't realize is that we instantly click "I Agree" because we assume that all of the fine print are written in a similar manner and it doesn't hurt us. The dark side of social media is that people don't realize that the fine print of these websites are to allow them to collect and monitor our day to day actions. These privacy statements are written in a way that its long and confusing so the users don't even bother trying to get through the entire thing. If the owner of Facebook's family photos are allowed to be viewed by people over the internet, than anyone's photo can be too. In order to keep ourselves safe, we simply should not post anything anywhere that you would regret later.

Reed, Daniel. "Survey Reveals Generation Gap in Attitudes about Security and Privacy." JavaWorld. Communications of the ACM, 11 May 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Greenfield, Rebecca. "Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private." DEC 26, 2012 10:44AM ET Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private. The Wire, 26 Dec. 2012. Web. 06 Mar. 2015.