Surveillance on Social Media

 I have had discussions with friends about how people tend to over tell on social media, which gives anyone access to the information. Sometimes people do not realize how much information they put online. When you tag a friend or family member on a photo, you are informing the public of your connection to one another. Facebook also gives people the option to label their relationship with other people. You can go into a profile and find out their birthday, high school/college, relationships, and interests.  You also see people put a lot of personal information in their bio. When we have so much information public, we can surveil each other without little effort. All you need to know is the first and last name of someone. 

    A lot of younger people use social media to surveil their crush. In grade school, when a friend had a crush, we would spend time going through their social media. We would be careful to not like or comment on posts that were too far back, so they wouldn't know we were looking through their posts.

    A way to prevent this is by keeping your profile private and limit the information you post publicly. You also have to worry about posts that you are tagged in that are on a friend's timeline. You don’t have a lot of control over what information goes public. This is similar to security cameras or other public surveillance. This is one of the reasons that limiting the government is so hard. If your information is public, you don’t have a say on who sees it.