This post was done almost a year ago, but its news to us. We are aware that there is a proliferation of social network usage in education because it is a way that teachers can communicate with students, administrators and so on. It brings up the subject of is it better to stick to what has always worked, or is it better to go to where the students are? It is my thinking that there has to be a balance, it can’t be all school or all student.
But the point of this post is privacy and the right to control your own information. Basically, you once you sign up and agree to one of the major social networks, ie Facebook, Twitter, etc, you lose oh, about 90% of the control of your own information. You might be having a great time interacting with all your other friends, but your network is mining, filtering and eavesdropping on everything you do so they can sell your information to companies. At the moment that might not seem so sinister, but what happens when you realize that everything that you share on your social network becomes property of the network itself? That you no longer own the photos of your family and that you can only say what they allow you to say?
What about when they start to use your social networking information to determine if you deserve the job that job that you want so badly. What you thought was just a goof between friends, is now stopping you from eating, thanks facetwit.

Social networking is here to stay. Virtually everyone reading this has an account with one of these sites, if not more than one. And who are we to criticize? We have “share” buttons on every page of this website. Social networking sites are how humans interact now, and it will continue until the day the zombies eat through our network cables.

That’s what makes increasingly annoying and/or invasive social networking practices so much harder to swallow. We want all of the below to stop and, barring that, at least not get any worse. But if they don’t, what are we going to do? Ditch our computers and go live in the woods? – via Cracked

Some of the things they are doing:

1. Insisting They Can’t Protect Your Private Info Without More Private Info
2. Tracking Where You Are (Whether You Like It or Not)
3. Reading (and Censoring) Your Private Messages
4. Removing Your Ability to Say “No”
5. Following You Around the Internet (Whether You Want Them to or Not)
6. Making It Ridiculously Hard to Delete Anything

Privacy and Copyrights are going to be the major battles coming in the future, and social networking sites are part of the proving grounds. It will be the precedents that they set with their voluntary memebership that will plot the course of what is publicly acceptable in the future as the developed world moves even faster towards a more virtual world. Make sure you read the article, its eye opening