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Introduction
It was time when, I was trying to recover from examination fever which would mark end of my B.Tech. That is only possible if in case I pass. For a change, I decided to visit City Mall with my few college friends. There were always great chances that you meet some familiar face in the one and only mall in the state capital, Raipur.
“Hey! How are you friend?” my long lost school friend asked me, whom I bumped in second floor on way to INOX movie theater.
I racked my brain nerves for few minutes trying to recall the name of familiar face. “I’m doing well” came out of my mouth with no good interest, knowing that he was my classmate once, but never within our friends circle. Therefore, I continued with formalities “What about you and where Pallavi is these days?” I enquired; she was the only hottie celeb whom everyone knew in our school.
“Well, everything fine yaar. I guess she’s in Delhi pursuing degree from Lady Shri Ram College” he answered lamely “Are you on facebook?” suddenly he questioned me, like he was desperately trying to increase his Farmville neighbors.
“Of course” I replied.
“Then don’t forget to add me” he insisted “it’s Avinash Chobey”
“Okay !” I nodded. At least, I was able to know his name without making him aware. I watched him leaving the place making me ponder about old school days. When I attended lectures like almost invisible to everyone. No one knew me except myself.
This might have happened with you as well. When you might have met someone after a long time. In that case you might spend few minutes catching up on each others lives, exchanging news about common friends, sharing few laughs and recalling good times. You might exchange phone numbers or even joyously arrange a get-together at a future date. But you probably wouldn’t automatically start rattling off every detail of every place you’ve been and every new friend you have made in last decade.
Imagine now that instead of walking up to that friend you found his profile on Social networking site like facebook, Orkut or any other in automatic suggestion just by chance and send him a message and invitation. You’ve most probably just handed him not only an entire summary of the activities of your life, but also access to your photos and videos, personal thoughts, group memberships, and list of other friends-and all this despite not knowing the first thing about what he’s been up to and who his friends are. A few days after he adds you, you see you have friend requests from dozen other former classmates, none of whom you were particularly good friends with or would ever consider contacting yourself. They say your name pop up in there news feed, since your old friend was on there lists. Now all of these semi-random acquaintances know you have an active profile and you feel awkward about ignoring them.. You just click ‘Accept’
Each one of them can now see very last detail of your life.
That one branch spawned a dozen other branches and each of those dozen could spawn another dozen. Like the root of the tree, your online connection can quickly grow into vast, overlapping, complicated network of interconnected strands, and you will quickly loose control over not only you’re connected to, but who can steal your information to make your life miserable.
Your photos could be copied, altered and reposted online. Your email address could be harvested by spammers or your parents could one day mortify you by leaving comments on your friends’ updates! All of this is possible with social networking.
Myspace,facebook,Twitter,Hi5, Orkut, and dozen of others mainstream or niche social networking used to be vast, open playgrounds where people freely posted about the most intimate details of there life. The threat of stalker is very real. I remember my one 19 year old friend from Mumbai who prefers to remain unnamed was repeatedly send friend requests on Facebook by the stranger over the course of seven months. She didn’t know who the person was and kept declining. His profile had a film starts photo with absurd caption defining love, with no clue about she might know her. They had no friends in common and his profile showed only 8 connections, implying that account had been made solely for the purpose of sending messages anonymously. The request then started including remarks about her that included references to places she had recently visited and al least one extremely vulgar comment about her partying and drinking.
After frantically checking all her security setting to make sure her updates weren’t visible to strangers, she realized that photo tagged with her name was visible not only to friends, but also strangers tagged in the same photo and their friends! That meant any photos taken at parties where it’s impossible to know everyone, and which has been helpfully tagged by a friend, were visible to that friend’s friend too-which meant she had absolutely no idea how many people could see the and who they where. The girl eventually used Ignore and flag feature to repot abuse, but still has no idea whether the stranger was someone she’d ever met or who might someday recognize her in public.
Another example, twenty one year old Delhi resident Radhika was left red-faced after he boyfriend’s mother gave her a stern lecture about drinking one day. Once again, the culprit was a Facebook photo gallery. “I wanted to run home and untag myself from every photo I’d ever been in, even if it meant my friends would never be able to find me. But the damage had already been done” she cried to me online.
The amount of information about you that’s just readily available to strangers is staggering, but the situation is actually getting even more dangerous. With a little knowledge about appropriate DOS commands, IP address could be easily found which in turn reveals user’s approximate location with the help of Geobytes.com
Usually people have generated tendency to make fake profile apart from original one. With help of it they sneak-peek, spy, monitor, collect information, and they interfere in personnel life of others and do numerous other evil things which they only know.
According to latest survey, every third person has a fake profile. Therefore, biggest problem on Social Networking Sites are filthy fake profiles. With average number of one hundred fifty friends, neither I nor you can tell which are real or fakester. Still we keep on counting them, talk them, share them, and trust them. Thinking one self intelligent, millions of people have made fake profile forgetting the gospel truth “One day rat meets cat, cat meets dog, dog meets wolf, wolf meets lion and lion will finally meet human one day.” I’ve learned that sweetest fantasy to worst nightmare is possible until we are online. Now it’s your turn.
