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Social Networking Sites

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Social networking sites Online social networking site is a very common tool for communicating and socializing with each other. Nowadays, most of the adolescent like to use Facebook. There is a rapid growth of the number of user of social networking sites. According the recent research, Kreutz (2009) stated that “starting from 1997 to 2010 there are some 1.5 billion users of social networking websites” (p.222). This shows that how popular the social networking site is. Although many parents think that there are many existing dangers in social networking sites, it is good for both education and interpersonal relationship for the teenagers. This essay will discuss the benefits and negative effects of using social networking sites for young …show more content…

The social networking sites attract the online predators to conduct their criminal activities. These social networking sites suggest people to put all their personal information on their profile page when they are registering as their new members; it is easy for criminals to get this information. In Facebook, teenagers like to put all the information including personal image, name, date of birth, hometown and ZIP code in their profile page. The criminal can use this information to find out a person’s sensitive medical information and security number. They also can easily estimate physical location of a person by using the information provided on Facebook profile page. People are least bothered about their profile privacy. Although there is an option of visibility on the user profile fields on these sites. This means user can decide which information can be seen by everyone on the network, but most of the teenagers tend to keep their profiles open to everyone. They are happy to share their personal information in online world. Fukuyama, Lewis and Weigert (2007) in their respected papers claimed that “trust is a critical determinant in personal or face to face relationships”(p.48). This means trust is an important factor that determines the crime is success or not. It will not be very difficult for an online predator to gain trust from an individual by employing interactions, especially most of the online predators prefer to meet

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