myITLawyer

The internet has enabled a lot of people from all around the world to communicate with others and has provided a platform for those without a voice to speak up and reach out for an international audience without any physical restriction, and just as much as it has brought the best of people in terms of creativity and innovation, it has also brought the worst of people as it enabled them to talk freely under the cape of anonymity.

I do not think that I am the only one who said some really strange things to people online which I will never dream of saying to their faces in real life. A visit to any public discussion board on the internet would show you how much people swear at others, make fun of them, and even maybe harass them. Many people forget that there are human beings behinds these nicknames with feelings that could get hurt.

The concept of freedom of expression is pretty new to the traditionally conservative Omani society, and the sudden explosion of opportunities opened by the web led some to assume that freedom of expression means that they have the right to say whatever they want, just because they can, without thinking about the consequences, but the truth is that there is nowhere in the world where freedom of speech is an unlimited right, because no matter what personal right a person has, it must not infringe on the rights of others.
In Oman, and many other countries, this right is restricted by some other legal principles such as defamation and breach of confidence. Defamation is generally defined as the act of spreading false information about a person which could harm that person’s reputation. This law is much more stricter in Oman than in some other places like the UK or the USA as defamation is a criminal act and not merely a civil matter. In addition to this, there is no clear requirement in the law for the statement to be false for it to be offensive, but merely requires it to have the consequence of damaging that person’s reputation.

Freedom of expression is further restricted by the law of the breach of confidence, if a person receives any information with a clear expectation to keep that information in confidence, that person would be under a legal duty not to disclose that information to anyone else. This is a general principle that applies to all sorts of information whether it was a a private issue told between friends or a serious confidential document delivered in a professional capacity, for example, the medical records of a patient.
These two are examples of the most obvious restrictions to freedom of expression on the internet or otherwise, but are not the only ones, in Oman, the Telecommunication Law also provides for a number of other restrictions such as prohibiting the transmission of harmful and untruthful messages through any means of communication.

The perception of the internet as an unregulated medium that allows people to say anything they want is far from true, the legal system covers a wide number of instances where speech on the internet could be punishable, and with the development of new methods for tracking the visitors of a website, it becomes not too difficult to enforce these laws on the internet.

Facebook officially launched its new controversial privacy settings which will have a significant instant impact on the extent to which private information is shared on it. Facebook claims that these new changes will help make it easier for users to decide what to share and with whom, but the reality is that the amount of information that can be set to private has been reduced and the default privacy settings are now configured to to have most content shared with the everyone on Facebook and beyond.

The original success of Facebook over other social networks such as MySpace is believed to be attributed to the high levels of privacy it allowed its users to have. Previously, users had the option to share some of their personal data ,such as their profile picture, with certain groups of users, such as friends only, however, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, the pages the user is a fan of, and some other personal information, are all now treated as publicly available information which cannot be hidden from anyone if the user chooses to put them on Facebook.
Another major change under the new privacy scheme is that default settings for writing new status updates and sharing pictures and other content, are set to be shared with everyone instead of friends only. This means that when you make a new status update this update will be visible to everyone whether or not you have them as friends, and as a lot of content on Facebook can be indexed by search engines such as Google, this means that even people not on Facebook may find your status updates if they make a relevant search. While privacy settings for such a feature could be configured to a more private option, the majority of users do not check their settings and very few people would realize that their old default settings were changed to the new default settings for sharing everything with everyone without them taking any action!

The new changes in privacy settings do have some new options that could allow users to have better privacy. For example users now have the option to have per-status update privacy restrictions so that you post an item that you share only with your close friends or only with your work colleagues without affecting the rest of your updates.

It is widely believed that the new changes in Facebook privacy settings were made to push people to share more information with everyone, while this might not be in the interest of the majority of the users, Facebook hopes that this would enable it to compete with services such as Twitter – which by default makes users share their micro status updates openly. However, the purpose of Facebook is totally different from that of Twitter and Facebook’s attempt to expand into Twitter might be faced with a backlash.
If you are on Facebook and you regularly share private pictures of your family and friends, you might want to make sure you check the new privacy settings of Facebook and set your content to be viewable only by the groups of people you desire. If you would not like everyone to know that you are fan of a certain page, you have no option but to unsubscribe from that page. The same goes for your profile picture, and other information classified as publicly available information, which you will have to remove completely from Facebook if you do not want everyone to see it.

The nature of Facebook is changing and this might be a reflection of the increased willingness of people to share more things online, but I doubt that the majority of people appreciate the impact this information could have on their social and professional life. It is still very unwise to share private information without any restrictions as it would be very hard, if not impossible, to get them off the internet afterwards.