My Mom and Facebook: Two Things I Never Thought Would Connect

           2,295. I could lie to you and say this is how much money I have in my bank account or make up some other use for this number, but as embarrassed as I am to admit it, it is the number of friends I have on Facebook. The other day I was sitting at my kitchen table chatting with a friend from school, when my mom walked by and laughed making a sarcastic comment about not being surprised that I was on Facebook. I gave her a look showing that I was somewhat offended, while spitting out a line about how I am not on Facebook that much and then went on defending myself saying I had a reason to be on Facebook which was to get information about a homework assignment. I told her that I NEEDED to be on Facebook and it was my generations form of email. The conversation then went down the road of “back in my day” blah blah blah and my mom made the point that at least with email she has privacy. I didn’t really know how to respond to that, so she eventually asked how many friends I have.  I told her I didn’t have very many and went to check in front of her. I looked at the number and it read 2,295. My mom continued to mock me telling me I am very popular to have over 2,000 people who I know personally while I stared at the screen in shock. 2,295? I don’t know that many people on a personal level I thought to myself. How did I come to allow so many people to view every aspect of my life? My birthday, where I work, where I live, where I go to school, who is in my family, and pictures exposing what I do with my time are all on my page, available for all of those people to see. I expressed my surprise to my mom and we both decided to go through the list of my friends and see who I really know and who I don’t. As I went down the list I realized I had never heard of or met a bunch of the people who I gave access to my profile. I also realized that I knew some of these people through mutual friends and met them once or twice, but didn’t really need to be friends with them.  The fact that I had allowed so many strangers and distant acquaintances have access to my personal information, scared me. I have always been good at keeping my profile private and not putting discriminating pictures or posts up, but I guess I slacked a bit on friend request security. I then decided to delete people who I do not talk to or flat out don’t know. If someone needs to get a hold of me they get my phone number from a friend or send me a message without seeing my personal information. I am still working on deleting some people, but it is time consuming so I am hoping to have a better hold on this by the end of summer.  The readings from this week have really opened my eyes to the importance of double checking what information you allow others to see online and it is something I need to tighten up on.

*I didn’t really know what image or link to attach with this blog, but here is a picture of my mom and me because she inspired me to tighten the reigns on Facebook security!