IMPORTANCE OF MAINTAINING PRIVACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR IT PROFESSIONALS

IMPORTANCE OF MAINTAINING PRIVACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR IT PROFESSIONALS 

Enabled by powerful, easily accessible and user friendly Information Technology applications Social media have spread across many people and organizations across many industries. (Bernoff & Schadler, 2010) Common Social media includes blogs, microblogs, wikis, social networking sites and video-or content-sharing sites (Piskori & McCall, 2010) which has become a part and parcel of everyone’s life. Especially for IT professionals it plays a major role as they always engage in their profession using computers and Mobile phones which has easy access to these social media and even can say that they lead the charge in the usage of these than other professionals.

Social Media and privacy have become a controversial topic and much publicized topic since the introduction of Social media. Day to day we see in news websites plenty of cases of crime due to social media privacy issues. Due to this large number of events there is a debate among public whether privacy in Social media can be dismissed as a relic in information age because if people are ready to share everything in Social media that means they have abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy (Madden, 2012). But when we think in another angle there maybe majority people who may involve in these activities without a proper knowledge in Social media Privacy. In the case of IT professionals the society recognize them as people who have a sound knowledge about everything related to computers, internet and social media but in reality even majority of the IT professionals are in the group who share information in Social media without knowing about the privacy issues.

Social media has totally changed the way how people communicate these days and IT professionals are no exception to this. Before the Social media came up the best way for IT professionals to meet up with their peers are professional events and industry related organizations. But now after social media arrived IT professionals not only could keep in touch with peers anytime but also have contact with the extended groups of influencers who interact with those peers (Weglage, 2010) This may be very useful profession wise to get to know people of the same area expertise and share ideas but they tend to forget that they’re just peers not close friends whom you can share your personal life with. Having contacts with such people through social media may expose your family background and other personal details which may affect you in an unexpected way in the future. This is one of the reasons an IT Professional should maintain privacy on Social media and these kind of situations can be prevented in Social Media like Facebook where the user can limit and put privacy to what each person could see and have separate privacy settings for close friends, family members and peers.

The using of social media by employees of organizations such as IT companies have various impacts on their company internally where it is related to organizational work and cultures and externally where what’s the type of image the professionals create to the outer world about the organization through social media (Kane, et al., 2009) These factors will encourage the organization to encourage one aspect and eradicate the other this is one of the factors that justifies the activity of IT companies controlling the social media activities of the IT professionals. (Emmanuelle & Evgeny , 2013) The IT professionals should understand this logic and maintain privacy on social media related to their workplace. There are some organizations who even go to the extent of blocking social media sites inside the organization in order to prevent privacy issues. Not only inside office but also handling social media outside must be taken care safely. Especially posting tweets or status updates about a project you’re working on will may even lead your company to take legal actions against you depending on the seriousness of the issue. In such an instance you’re breaking the confidentiality of your job, therefore sharing work related information on social media should be totally prohibited or must be put privacy to close people on sites like Facebook. Sharing them in sites like twitter isn’t safe at all as it is visible to all your followers and you don’t need a clear identity to follow you on twitter so anyone and everyone can hide their identity and follow your tweets. Even blogging about work you did in your company for your company such as blogging about a program you wrote for your company will lead you to legal issues because the rights of the program is owned by the company and no one has rights to copyright it without permission. So proper privacy should be maintained on professional articles published on blogs.

Another work related privacy mistake in Social media many IT professionals make is adding their senior officers as friends in social media such as Facebook and Myspace. In a situation where you can’t ignore him and is forced to add them special attention should be made to put privacy settings in a way that won’t bring a bad opinion or suspicion on you. In a research made recently among employees of fortune 100 companies it’s been found that nearly 15% are guilty of sharing work related content and sharing unprofessional photographs taken inside their workplace been shared in social media. If these kind of material is seen by higher officials in the workplace it may even become a threat for his job and may even face further severe actions. Therefore when adding a higher officer adds you in his social media network privacy controls become handy to make sure they don’t see such content. Maybe sharing content such as CFR projects done by the company and other achievements may give a good opinion and make believe others that he enjoys his job and is dedicated for the growth of that entity.

 IT companies are work places where you find various types of people from various background, religion, race and political ideas work. Studies made by Global teams on IT companies show that cultural differences affect work ethic, method of communication, revering hierarchy and other factors which may have negative influences on team members. (Edwards & Sridhar, 2002) When an IT professional shares something on Facebook or twitter that is attacking a particular race, party or religion and colleagues or  higher officials who belong to that group sees it in social media it will make a bad opinion about him. Not only a bad opinion but it may even lead to an argument and other workers may feel awkward to work together with him and higher officers may consider it as a black mark on him which can affect his promotions and appraisals considering him as a person who cannot work with a team or lead a team with different types of people. So IT professional should be aware about what they’re sharing and privacy can be set in a way that it won’t be visible to them.

In the present day, Social media profiles are being used to judge a person’s character. Recruiters checking people’s social media profiles before recruiting a person to their company is a good example for this. This make you wonder how a person’s online social life can be a factor in future professional life, There are situations when finding difficulty to find the correct person among two ended up after checking their content in social media. Currently there are no regulations to protect job applicants from this harassment (Nicole & Matt, 2007). The best and only way to prevent this situation for an IT professional is to cleanup all unwanted details in his social media content as soon as he/she sends a job application and put privacy to content which may give a wrong idea about that person. Especially profile pictures, cover photos should be decent content unlike pictures of drinking and partying will create a negative opinion. LinkedIn is a very important social media that recruiters have most interest on and it should be up to date where they can get a good impression and correct understanding about that person. It’s one social media that should be with less privacy and more professional so that employers can know more about you.

It is the information era and people should learn and get used to the different opinions on social media and privacy related issues. Also world is too fast and busy to care for others so your privacy should be taken care by yourself and you cannot expect others to care for your privacy in social media. As IT professionals our approach towards Social media privacy should be exemplary for others being people who are more involved with computers, internet and other communication technology.