Well Informed: Privacy 2.0

Privacy 2.0

Our professor is right on the money when he says that there is an inner fallacy with the illusion of online privacy. At any point do we ask ourselves exactly what we are giving up in exchange for conveniences on our technologically driven lives? The answer is simply that too many people cannot be bothered to care. To me, online privacy has always been a concern in the back of my mind. I am and have been aware from early on in the rise of technology and the internet that by contributing any information anywhere, I have forfeited my privacy. 

For example, at a very basic level anyone can dig into your personal information through the use of social media. Although sites like Facebook, Instagram, and twitter claim to protect the profile of their users, they also leave them very vulnerable at the same time. During the summer of 16 I lived in OKC and one day my friend an I went to buy a swimsuit (shorts) from Ross. As we walked in I found the cashier to be very pretty and my friend egged me on to get her number. After finding her on Facebook the idea of how scary and vulnerable social media is occurred to me. Purely as an experiment I decided to be that friendly neighborhood creeper and find out any info that would give me an insight as to who this girl was. It took me all of 15 minutes to find her name,age, family, school, address. vehicle license plate number and an approximate idea of what her schedule was. Mind you I didn't have any interest in bringing her harm, but what was there to stop someone with more malice from doing it? Sure there are privacy settings but although this girl's accounts were set this way, it was fairly simple to extract the information I needed by accessing all her social platforms and a quick google search.

 Taking some Inspiration from what we learned in class, I decided to do some research into the realm of protecting online privacy. After sorting through countless posts from many sources I came across the Article in Forbes which deals with very simple procedures one should take in order to minimize their online exposure. I found a few of these Tips to be very interesting, as they do not clearly specify to stop using social media, but they do point to it. Mostly they dealt with stopping the use of mainstream platforms to track history such as browsers and search engines. The point that I aim to make is to reaffirm that of what I have always know. Privacy is a joke. there is no guarantee from anyone or anywhere that any information you input, knowingly or not. Can and MIGHT be used to harm you in the wrong hands.