Balancing Outreach and Privacy in Facebook

Balancing Outreach and Privacy in Facebook: Five Guiding Decisions Point by Peter Fernandez. This is actually an article that I used in my literature review. In no way does Fernandez say that it is easy to balance outreach and privacy but in all reality embarking on something new is never easy. He talks about how there are many people utilizing Facebook. In the article he says, "Facebook interactions raises a host of questions for libraries such as how to handle potentially hateful speech, to relatively simple things, like what to do if patrons post false, or otherwise problematic information to the site. When a library allows or encourages its patrons to contribute to any part of its site within Facebook, that information will also be tied to the patrons Facebook profile. As a result, the library has an ethical obligation to be aware of potential abuses, and determine how it want to regulate interaction that occur on its site." This quote makes me think about how in school libraries have to protect our students identities from others and that by having our patrons Facebook pages linked to ares can lead to others looking at their page. This would make the need for us to educate our patrons on privacy settings all the more important. Overall, I like this article and felt that this author had a lot of relevent things to say on the subject.