Young people’s attitudes toward privacy on social media

Today millions of people use social media for personal and professional interaction as it is a fastest means for communication. This technological acceleration brings one major concern for users. That is privacy on working with social media. Youngsters frequently use social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Snapchat and FourSquare for chatting with friends, searching for job, exploring higher studies opportunities and communicating with family and friends. Therefore they are concern about its privacy.

In present scenario, youngsters are more involved in sharing their profile, pics and other information as compared to earlier time. It is because of expanding network to get better job or enjoy sharing events with friends. When youngsters use social media sites, they must be concerned and understand the privacy risks involved. Currently, hackers stalk the social media networks looking for victims. They use shortened URLs to play a trick to attract their victims to visit harmful sites or to inoculate viruses into their computers or mobile phones.

Youngsters mostly share information in social media sites like birthday and email address. Identity thieves tend to collect their victims’ personal information from the information available on the social media sites. Many identity thieves tend to hack their victims email accounts by simply using the personal information available on social media profile. But youngsters are smarter and grown up today and carefully fill up information in social sites. Youngsters are taking strong initiative to ensure their privacy on social sites. They are well aware that strong passwords must be created so that hackers cannot crack the same. In creating password, special characters can be added such as symbols, numbers, and capital letters.

According to survey reports on youngsters, they put more attention on privacy management on social media sites. Many youth Facebook users keep their profiles private, and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.

It is visualized that social Medias are vital part of today’s global society.  Privacy is one of the most important issues as users share plenty of personal information at common place.