Privacy, Intellectual Property and access to Social media


It is important that users of social media be aware of privacy, security and intellectual property issues around the uses of social media and the challenges they present. Working with social media tools and services brings up privacy concerns such as:

• Who will have access to  information posted? Is this appropriate?
• What are its potential uses? Is this acceptable?
• Are we willing to have a permanent record of this data out on the web?

Most commercial social media sites base their business models on advertising revenue. Information we publish on the Internet has the potential to be reproduced and archived many times, even when we take it offline.

Intellectual property refers to the legal rights associated with inventions, artistic expressions and other products of the imagination such as literary works, music, papers etc. The expansion of the Internet has posed many challenges to the way intellectual property has traditionally worked:

• The public domain refers to materials and content that are not controlled or owned by anyone.

• Creative Commons Licences allow authors to publish their works under a licence that grants fewer restrictions than traditional copyright. 
• Open Source is used to talk about programs with licences that give users the freedom to:
• run the program for any purpose;
• study and modify the program; and
• redistribute copies of either the original or modified program.

Not everything on the web is reliable information. Much of the content  on the web has been authored by people who are interested in a topic, but who may not have done a lot of research or fact checking