The Advent of Privacy Controls
Although the common perception is that social networks have reduced privacy on the Internet, this is far from the truth. Before social networks became popular, the Internet was already on a trend toward becoming less private. The explosion of digital cameras encouraged photo sharing, blogs encouraged people to share their lives online, and improvements in search engines made it easier to find personal websites of others. Social networks contributed to this trend toward sharing content by making it easier and more centralized.
However, the advent of social networks actually led to an increase in privacy controls on the Internet. By making it easy to define a network of friends, social networks allowed users to control who could and could not see the information and media they posted online. Although many users do not take advantage of these privacy controls, users today are better off than they were in the early days of the Internet, when posting something online meant sharing it with the entire digital world.
While social networks often offer powerful privacy settings, users usually leave them untouched. Users are often ignorant of how much information they expose and how much control they have over this exposure, and frequently complacent about the dangers of social networks. Together, ignorance and complacence mean that users seldom change their privacy settings from their defaults. Since it is in the interest of social networks to keep profiles as public as possible, to encourage browsing and networking, users are automatically exposed to the public eye once they sign up, and their ignorance and complacency usually keep them that way.