Imagine that youโre on your way out of your therapistโs office. The elevator opens and the person waiting by the door gives you a double-look. Youโve never seen them before. You donโt know them. But they know your name, who you work for, what school you went to, the details of your recent break-up, your struggles with an eating disorder, and of course the fact that youโre seeing a therapist to get your life back in order.
Sound impossible? That, more or less, was a real scenario described in an article published recently on Fusion about social network privacy. โLisa,โ a psychiatrist who occasionally uses Facebook to RSVP to events, began to notice that Facebook was recommending some of her patients as friends. That was bad enough but it soon became worse. One young patient also reported seeing older folk turning up in his friend suggestions. They werenโt the snowboarders and extreme sports enthusiasts that he usually connected with on social networks, and he reasoned, correctly, that they were all seeing the same psychiatrist.
For another patient, the connection was stronger still. She was offered a friend recommendation that showed someone she remembered seeing in the psychiatristโs elevator. โSuddenly, she knew the other patientโs full name along with all their Facebook profile information,โ the article stated.
Itโs possible that Facebook had been using location data to connect people who had been to the sample place or it might have been trying to bring people together whose smartphone contact lists included the same phone number. Whatever Facebook was doing, the result was a massive privacy breach. Itโs no wonder that as users are becoming more aware of privacy issues and more concerned about different parts of their lives leaking into each other (a situation experts call โcontext collapseโ), theyโre sharing less on social networks. Between 2014 and 2015, as the sharing of news content on Facebook continued, the sharing of personal stories on Facebook dropped 21 percent.
But while users can respond to privacy issues by saying less, for some professionals it appears that just being on the site can cause serious privacy problems.
Thatโs one of the reasons that private social networks are so important. They bring together people with a shared interest โ and only those people. Theyโre a solution for people who arenโt just cautious about their privacy but who have a very real need to maintain it.
When youโre running your own private social network, itโs vital to keep your usersโ need for privacy in mind. Make sure that your members know that you prioritize the confidentiality of their data. Teach them how to use the privacy settings. Explain to them that on a private social network, itโs safe to talk openly.
If โLisaโ had been able to respond to events on a private social network instead of on Facebook, thereโs a good chance that she would have been sharing moreโฆ and her patients wouldnโt have been giving each other funny looks in the elevator.
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