Blog Post #8: On and Offline Privacy

After watching the Ted Talk videos on privacy, my perspective on privacy on and offline has changed especially through technology. More and more data is being collected from each one of us because of the heavy use of technology in today’s world. We have to accept that when it comes to the digital age with photos, conversations, health information, or even finances, nothing can be private. We do so many things online that it can't be stopped.

Andy Yen's TED Talk, Think your email's private? Think again dives deeper into the idea of emails and how each email we send gets added up into a collection of emails which puts our footprint out there. The pace of technological innovation has immensely eliminated our ability to protect our privacy. Whether we recognize it or not our digital footprint is being tracked. Every day new and more advanced technology is being created that is tracking what we do online and even off.

The internet has changed the way that the world works in many different ways including the way we do business, the way we communicate, and also the way that we live. The internet has had a positive and negative in the way society is run. Almost everybody has some if not a lot of personal information online. This can be through social media like Facebook and Twitter, Google searches, or even every time an email is sent on our behalf.

Another TED Talk that stood out to me was, Your online life, permanent as a tattoo by Juan Enriquez which emphasized the idea that what we do online is like a tattoo. Would we be using the online platforms we use every day if they were like tattoos? There are definitely more people in the world that have online accounts than tattoos because tattoos are permanent and online are not but that's wrong. Enriquez says in his talk that Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, and travel Advisor all are electronic tattoos that we have created for ourselves. These electronic tattoos are treats to each one of us because of the possibility of all our information and identity could be released.

After watching the TED talks, it has made me realize that the government should be doing more to address this issue. It is hard to say exactly what they should do but one factor they could focus on is making sure people's information does not leave the U.S. Companies should not have the ability to sell information outside of the country and the government could try and stop this from happening. 

Today there is no such thing as online privacy so we must be really careful about everything we say and post online. We might think that we are posting content just followers but anything you post on the internet.

To protect ourselves from invasions of our privacy we need to be careful and thoughtful about what we put out on the internet. The less information that is shared online the better it is for your privacy. Some tips about protecting your privacy are written on the website, 30 Ways to Love Yourself Online states some reasons including, creating strong passwords, not using the same passwords on multiple accounts, locking your device, and always logging out of browsers. If we follow these it will not be perfect but can be a start to keeping our online privacy.