[QUOTE=Drum God]
The motive for this little experiment has to do with my daughter’s activity on the internet. Like so many teens, she’s into the social networking websites (I won’t say which one). I have tried to pursuade her that she is not as anonymous as she thinks she is. She hasn’t done anything out of the ordinary, or wildly inappropriate, but she needs to know that she can be found.
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While other posters have given good information regarding this particular message board and general privacy, it would also benefit you to look at the particulars of the Web site(s) your daughter is using.
Facebook.com, for instance, is highly tied to a specific [del]educational institution[/del] college, high school, “region” or workplace. With the exception of the “region” networks, each of these requires an affiliated email address to join (thus your daughter couldn’t join the University of Michigan facebook unless she had access to an email address from the University of Michigan).
Once a person is a member of a network, she can generally add friends from any network and anyone can add her as a friend. This can be adjusted in the privacy settings to allow only friends from the same network. These friends and networks form the basis of Facebook’s privacy settings.
First and most basic, you can control who can see your profile. The broadest selection is that everyone in your network (and your friends) can see your profile. This means that no one from outside your network can see your profile (except people you have added as friends), and you can’t change that setting. You can tighten that down so that only “friends of friends” can see your profile, and even further so that only friends can see it. You can also narrow it down by types of people, only allowing people identifying themselves as undergrads, grad students, alumni, faculty and/or staff of your institution can see you.
It is important to note that your name will deliver results showing the fact you have a facebook account, the network it’s listed under and a default photo, even if you restrict who can view the profile itself.
From here, there are tons of privacy settings. You can set who sees almost any aspect of your profile to “entire network,” “friends of friends,” or “just friends,” you can set who can see some aspects to the above options plus “no one from my network,” (i.e. friends who are in other networks), or “no one at all.” You can block specific people from seeing your profile. You can set up a “limited profile” which allows certain named people to only see parts of your profile (they don’t know they can only see some of the information). If someone has “tagged” a photo with your name (identifying you and linking to your profile), you can unilaterally break that link.
The advantage of this complicated web of settings is that you can share some pretty private information with folks who you want to have access to it (I like that the people I work with at my school job can find my cellphone number on facebook if they need to get ahold of me), but you can keep others from having that information (ex-girlfriends).
The disadvantage: You have to USE the features. They don’t do any good if your default is “let everyone see everything.”
myspace.com I know less about, but it seems to be more open and more profiles and blogs seem to be viewable without logging in.
