Getting and giving friends respect online

You know what’s okay to say about your friends in the physical world, but there are some differences you need to consider when talking to others or about others online.

The first thing to consider is who will see your words online. In face-to-face conversations you see you’re talking to and modify your comments to fit the situation. Over the phone you know who’s on the call. Online you may or may not know who will see what you say. If someone else’s site or your site is locked down to just friends you both know, you can use the same considerations as you would face-to-face or over the phone. If you don’t know who else may see the interaction you have to assume that anyone could see it and respect your friends’ privacy as you would expect them to respect yours. It’s rude to expose information about someone – including pictures and videos -- without their permission. The only way you’ll know what they want kept private is to ask them; and the only way for them to know what you want private is to tell them

You may be surprised to learn how much your friends expose about you and how much you may inadvertently be exposing about them. This example is taken from the public social networking site of a girl who made her profile anonymous. She didn’t give her name, used a photo of her cat, didn’t provide her age or city, and only mentioned her state. But three comments by friends completely exposed her.

Her name is Blanche O’connelly, her birthdate is July 16^th, and she turned 16 in 2006. Had you looked at the time you would know where her party was going to be held, where she lives, where she goes to school (her state combined with the school’s team name gives it away), where to find her at the game, and how to identify her (she’ll be with her friend and you know what her friend looks like). A friend has also provided her telephone number.

In addition, all of these friends have photos of Blanche on their sites – you know who Blanche is because under the photos it lists who is in the pictures.

That’s a lot of information to expose about someone who went to great lengths to remain private. There are two problems here: though Blanche did a lot to protect her privacy, she didn’t tell her friends that her privacy was important to her and Blanche’s friends were disrespectful by posting identifiable information about her without first learning her privacy boundaries.

Another problem occurs when a bunch of friends have private sites and share lots of information, then one friend decides to make her site public without first asking her friends what information she should remove (and then removing it) to respect their privacy.