Blog Assignment 6

In the essay “The Publication of Your Personal Profile”, the author, Megan Ramirez, talks about the potential risk of using social networks like Facebook and MySpace where the users’ personal information as well as privacy have become exposed to public eyes. In other words, basically everyone can have access to your personal profile by creating a Facebook account, regardless of her identity. That person could be your employer, a family member, a friend, or in the worst case, a total stranger. Quoting the author’s own words here, the users of social networking websites “are allowing their private lives to be published.” (Ramirez).

As the author pointed out, the fact that most Facebook users’ profiles are restricted, which means only accessible to friends, does not help with protecting the personal information since Facebook users tend to accept friend requests from people they don’t know. The same reason also explains the statement previously made: basically everyone can access others’ personal profiles by creating a Facebook account. Here the author used a quotation from the book “To Catch a Predator” to explain and support the point that most people easily accept requests from strangers: “An appealing picture, a friendly query, a similarity of interests, or someone who just seems ‘cool’ is often more than enough for kids to make exceptions and let someone into their site that they don’t, in fact, know” (Hansen 135)

According to the author, among the many risks of having your personal information under the public scrutiny is that the same personal information can also be reviewed by your potential employers. In other words, the personal details found on your Facebook can be determining factors of whether or not you will get the job you want. For instance, as the author explained, if you put pictures of you engaging in illegal actions, your potential employer might reject you after seeing those improper pictures. Using a paraphrase gained from an interview with Carrie Ramsey, a staff member who works in the human resources department, the author shows that even though most employers do not view the social networking pages of their potential employees, they still might decline a potential employee if they saw inappropriate pictures on his pages. From the interview with Ramsey, the author writes that “She (Ms. Ramsey) has never looked at a potential employee’s personal web page because she wants to focus solely on the skills and experiences of the potential employee. She does say, however, that if she had seen that potential employee engaging in illegal activities on a personal page, she would not decide to hire him or her” (Ramsey)

As a result, the author eventually concludes that people’s social networking profiles “are written representations of themselves” and that “people should decide how they wish to be portrayed and create their profiles accordingly”. (Ramirez)
In other words, users of social networking sites can be more protected from the risk of being publicly scrutinized if they do not put damaging or incriminating information on their profiles.