[Sigia-l] Social Networks and Social Responsibility [was] Tagged: Malicious Social Network

[Christine Abela]

>Illegitmate sites aside, shouldn't such social networking sites promote
>social reponsibility, champion the privacy of their users, and help
>protect the community from spammers?


I think it depends on what your definition of "social responsibility" is.
Piczo is trying to curb cyberbullying, Bebo is trying to raise the awareness
of what abuse is among their young users so they are empowered to speak out.
I would view these things as falling under social responsibility.

The privacy issue is interesting.  A Pew Internet study recently reported
that most teens have profiles that are private.  Some of the sites like
Bebo, actually make the profiles private by default as opposed to the
traditional public profile that a user has to set as private.  Piczo doesn't
allow profiles to be "searched" from within the community or from a service
like Google.  When it comes to "privacy of users" this is what some of the
social networking sites are focused on at the moment.

If we were to investigate social networking sites closer, I suspect we would
find that - especially today - there are more differences than similarities
in their efforts to address social responsibility, privacy, spamming issues,
etc.

Just my 2 cents,
Christine