On Facebook, Twitter or any other popular social network, users can nose around people's lives or follow their favorite celebrity, read interesting articles, post pictures, thoughts and videos or solve different quizzes and answer questions. People can also use many different applications and games which have the need of people to come back within an hour or two. With the advance of mobile technology, people can now also access the sites through mobile phones anywhere and anytime.
People spend their day following the stream, replying to messages, posting on the friend's profile or watching friends’ comings and goings.
The problem is that there is no stopping in the instant stream of messages, photos, comments, postings, blogs, sharing of stories, etc. So if a person wants to be on top of what's going on with their friends, they can't leave. Therefore, because of their features, social networking sites are very addictive and people are on them even during work or school, which can cause bad performance.
Many people lost their jobs because of spending work time on social networking sites or content posted there.
In the last few years we have seen many incidents of people losing their jobs because of social networks. It’s usually one of two reasons. First one is because they were caught on social network during work, when they instead should be working. This can be a consequence of an addiction to social networks.
The second, more frequent reason is that employers find inappropriate pictures and thoughts. Users are sometimes too open and post everything that is on their minds. Employers take advantage of social networks to find information on applicants or employees; as a consequence, people are often denied jobs or fired for posting inappropriate pictures, thoughts or jokes.
By using just one of the social networking sites there is already enough information about you gathered for employers to find and even though you can set all kinds of privacy settings, there are always holes in the system and your personal life is never really hidden.
Privacy settings in social networking have many loopholes and users’ privacy is often violated by the social media itself.
Social network sites are the ultimate source of peoples’ information – their habits, likes, interests, beliefs, etc. It’s gold mine for advertising companies. Social networks have all the information a successful advertiser needs. Working with social networks is super effective as they can use people’s information and target their ads appropriately. For example video game companies want to know which games people play, what they pay for those games, and how often they play them.
There are also loopholes in privacy settings. Pages (which people like) show exactly who liked them, even if those people have their profile and likes hidden. Advertisements can easily reach them.
Every piece of information you give on the social network sites is never completely hidden and can be easily violated.
Social network sites are like wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are under impression of being good for socializing when in fact they are a gold mine of information. That information is the key for advertisers who are digging and scratching for every piece of information they can get and when they do, they attack people as beast. This is a result of a lot of privacy issues social networking sites have.
People lose more than they gain because they easily lose their jobs as their personal life is no longer private. They also get sucked in this ability to be always informed and at the head of events. As a result, people end up addicted. Users will continue to lose jobs and become totally antisocial in real life.
There is no direct solution. People just have to realize the problem themselves, resist using social network sites and put much less information up for the whole world to see.
