Privacy and social media

At journalism school we're starting to discuss media law and ethics, and one of the trickier aspects is how social media is changing the equation. We keep coming back to the question of whether it's okay to grab photographs from Facebook accounts to use in our stories, and we still haven't really answered it yet.

This gets even more interesting (and unsettling) when you realise just how much you can find out about someone from Twitter, Facebook and Google, as journalist Joanna Geary recently demonstrated:

I’ve gone from one tweet to knowing an entire family’s names, location, address, contact details, what they look like, how they are connected to the military and, potentially, where a part of the US army is coming under fire.

I stop there because I am already completely freaked out by just how far I’ve already got from a few Google searches.

Throw in the fact that Facebook and Google are trying to grab as much influence over the Internet as they can - and insist people use their real names in the process - and you've got the next big conflict over privacy and freedom of speech staring you in the face.

I'll just be over here, locking down my Facebook pictures.