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The popularity of social networking sites has reached sky-high over the last years, but so have privacy-related worries, and most recently, health-related ones. After the wide-coverage of Facebook’s terms of service, which suffered some radical modifications earlier this month, social networking sites were found to give people not just headaches, but also increase risk of cancer.
According to British scientist Susan Greenfield of the Oxford University, the brain is so impressive that all that time people spend online could infantilize it. There is no scientific proof for that of course, but there are indications that this effect could indeed occur.
This is based on a little bit of neuroscience, observations, a bit of clinical evidence, there is no one single or conclusive killer fact, Greensfield explained, after raising the debate in the House of Lords, where she is a member.
It has recently been reported that one social network user stole a laptop just to check on his account, and that’s one of the mild cases. Abuse, spam, and violence over social networking accounts now occur on a daily basis, so it is obviously quite hard to deny that such websites don’t influence us.
The extent to which they do influence us however is still hard to pinpoint, but they undeniably have an effect on our lives, even though that cannot be proved scientifically.
Greensfield’s conclusions have been met with disagreement by some, including by representatives of social networking sites. But what if they prove to be true? How do we stop the negative effects of this increasingly popular process?
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