Aside from allowing people to connect from one another, building a safe, robust community over the web, another big responsibilty of social media providers is to give users barrier against outside parties that may be benefited of the information they share.

This is where the Privacy Policy comes in. Privacy policy is a statement or a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses and manages a customer or client's data. Personal information can be anything that can be used to identify an individual, not limited to but including; name, address, date of birth, marital status, contact information, ID issue and expiry date, financial records, credit information, medical history, where you travel, and intentions to acquire goods and services. (Wikipedia - Privacy Policy). Every website that collect information from users is required to declare privacy policies for the very purpose of letting the users know what particular information they collect and for what purpose these information are intended to be used.

Sadly, having these privacy policies taking in effect are "easier said than done" because of the factors like (1) users have lack of control over their privacy, (2) government's implementation of laws regarding user privacy are not really strong enough to protect the users and (3) most of the users just don't know the importance of privacy policy.

The MDG's recenlty published infographic shows these factors that took social media privacy into the most sad state. Right click the image below and select view image to view in full size.

Infographic by MDG Advertising