Privacy

In the current state of things, new media sites are the main way for people to communicate with one another. Since everyone is, hopefully, quarantining at home, it definitely makes people less careful and more active online. People tend to forget that anything you post online stays online forever, even past the pandemic, and may be brought up 10 years from now. 

Unlike old media, where it is mostly one way communication, new media, allowing for two way communication, makes it much easier for someone to say or mention something they shouldn't or wouldn't have done before. Although several social media sites have settings for the user to stay private or only share posts with a certain group of people, it doesn't mean that it is shared like that forever. I remember a while ago, there was a Facebook issue where a celebrity made a post of their family and shared it only with their close friends. However their friends didn't know that and also shared the post, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people also seeing a picture of the family. Things like this happen all the time and we have to be careful that things you believe are in private mode are actually so. Especially in the pandemic, we have to be extra careful about information we may be accidentally leaking out to the world.

I think the best way to maintain confidentiality in new media is to not post things that you wouldn't want the rest of the world to see. Additionally, I think that things like your full address, ID number, Social Security number, or any information that can be used to easily identify you should not be posted online. With new media, one of the faults is that you don't know where information can end up and can't really check everyone who sees your information, so it's best to not leave anything that can possibly go into the hands of a person planning to do bad with it.