Dr. A. Prabaharan's

Children were addicted to video games in the past. Now they are swapping their addiction to social networking sites with a bang. None other than the Google founders, Garry Page who is starting and buying a social networking site (SNW) every day is expressing anguish over the children’s maddening engagement with the SNWs. Not only SNWs but only anything in excess is dangerous for the health of human beings. Capitalising on the addictive habits of human beings online business houses are thriving. I found SNWs as a vital tool to conduct my cross country and cross cultural research to document the developments in digital society from 2000. Then it was a minor happening in the cyber space without much sensation. Today any one and every one is dancing in the SNWs. From grand ma to grand child, Face Book, Orkut, myspace are the ones where there is life. This craze will end one day like other sensational fashion tech developments. But when is that one day? The Times of India writes Google founders have warned that social networking sites are proving to be the biggest threat to While hitting back at critics who accused the search engine of “spying” on users, Larry Page, one of the founders, said that social networking sites are the biggest threat to people’s privacy on the internet. “The No 1 privacy issue is stuff that gets posted on networking sites,” the Mirror quoted Page, as saying. “Especially if you’re young and go to parties and get drunk and people take pictures, these things can pop up and hurt you. “There’s also an issue with people posting things about people that turn out not to be true,” he added. Page had set up Google with pal Sergy Brin in 1998. The statement came after Google was blasted for allowing clips of people having epileptic fit to appear on its You Tube site. “I don’t know about the epilepsy thing but I imagine if I saw someone who was going into a seizure and I wanted to be able to diagnose them it could be very useful to see a video on line that shows me what a seizure looks like,” said Brin. The critics have also blamed Google of giving user details to advertisers, however the founders strongly deny. “Some companies have aggressively pursued commercial deals and done things in a creepy, scary way that has set back the industry. But we need people to trust us and can’t compromise the business in that way,” said Brin Though he admitted that he holds a responsibility to users, he said that it was impossible to monitor everything. “There’s something like 10 hours of content uploaded on You Tube every minute,” he said. “But we have good guidelines which are enforced by everybody. “If you see a video you don’t like you can just tag it and we may take it down,” he added