Privacy?

Does it scare you that everything you see or do online is being monitored? Would it change the way you acted online? These are the questions we have been discussing this week and I don’t really think there is a clear answer on how to stay private anymore. It is pretty know that everything on the internet will stay on there forever and that we should be careful, but sometimes we don’t have control of what the internet chooses to use against us.

                In our generation, about the worst thing a person can do to another person is block them on the internet. This has become the grandiose punishment for lost friendships and broken relationships, we simply chose to cut them out of our life. However, this does not mean our interactions online will end there. Revenge posts are becoming increasingly popular with the expansion of internet relationships whether friendly or not. Spam accounts have great examples of these posts. People will create separate private accounts that only certain friends are allowed to follow so they can gossip about the people they know. Just because this account is private, doesn’t mean the information isn’t shared outside of this certain group of followers. Posts can get shared around by word of mouth or screenshots that can them be shared publicly. Sometime people will be confident enough to show their beef with people on their public page. A famous example of this would be with Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. After a long sporadic time of people claiming lyrics in different songs were disses on each other and coming back to social media to then deny these claims came to a head when Cardi B posted a video that went viral that  explained Cardi B’s true feeling towards Minaj. This only fueled the fire more and the two female rappers will go down in history with hard feelings. While these celebrities used the press to boost their own brands many people are bold enough to post this type of content without hesitation. This content can destroy people so we must all be on our toes with what our internet footprints look like and be cognizant of what others put online of you. If society could all learn to be respectful and not use the internet to bully people then maybe this problem could decrease, but for now we will have to do our best to monitor online to the best of our abilities to protect our image that is ever so important to us.

               

                Our lives our not private, we know that, but somehow we are all comfortable with this. We accept that everything we say and do online can be used against us. Our phones are always listening, which is how we are assigned the ads we see every day. There was a viral video in 2016 of a couple who thought Facebook had been listening to their conversations which then used hot words from those conversations to trigger ads. This couple then tested the theory by talking about cat food and given that they have never owned a cat they figured this would be the perfect word to see if their phones were listening. Sure enough after some repetition of the word cat food in conversation, the wife received an ad for cat food on her Facebook feed. I also feel like  I experience this, but I don’t necessarily do anything to stop it. Why is this? During class, we emphasized how most of the students in the class were comfortable with our phone recording our conversations and how odd that was. I believe this stems from the idea that Google and Facebook won’t bother doing anything to hurt us as individuals because why would they bother picking out us as one person of billions. We never know when Google could screw you over and post the most embarrassing pictures from your childhood that you begged your parents not to tag you in. People also mentioned that there should be know reason to be scared of our AI overlords because they have nothing to hide, which is a valid argument, but we all have something on our phones that we would not like to post publicly. Possibly, that video you watch at 2am in the morning when you get caught in the YouTube spiral. Our phones have all the information they need on us to keep us connected to them and to remind us that they have rule over our lives and image.

                We can do our very best to keep our information private and off the internet, but there is only so far a person can go. We have to trust that the online community and government will only use this information for business reasons instead of ruining our lives. Happy searching!

P.S. If you want to be terrified by this idea of online security watch the Black Mirror episode called “Shut up and Dance” viewer discretion advised.