Privacy in 2011

Not too many years ago if you wanted to talk to someone you had no choice but to either pick up the phone – it was luxury if the phone wasn’t tethered to a wall by a super long tangled cord- or walk your behind over to their home. Most people didn’t have computers because even if they used them at work they still had little need for them at home. As a matter of fact I remember being a kid and overhearing a lady at the beauty shop saying that computers didn’t have much use at all except for holding her recipes. Wow! Even as a kid I knew she was dead wrong and simply had no idea of the true potential of computers. Ok so now that I think of that story I had to be a teenager seeing as how I drove myself to that appointment. In defense of my point, I could add that I was a bit clueless as a teenager.

Ok reeling it in. Nowadays when we want to contact someone we have a variety of mostly instant to at worst almost instantaneous ways to contact each other. We can text or call or email or skype or ….. I mean the list is endless. Every time I look up someone is trying to use another service to communicate with me. In a way it’s a little annoying like how many apps must I be asked to use? Can’t we all pick yahoo or google and be done with it?

So why is it people post their every thought on twitter and facebook (guilty!!), register for all these different online services to play with, apply for 30 credit cards in college to get a free T-shirt and then act surprised and appalled when grandma forwards them an email showing them 1 link where their information is all up on the internet?! The email of course contains some futile set of instructions on how to hide this information. Let me explain why this is a complete waste of time. For that one site grandma found out about there’s 40 more with the same info. The information is out there. As a society, we have to admit that we have traded privacy for convenience. We all love the convenience of things like having your prescription at every Walgreens instantly, getting our emails and other notifications on our phone wherever we are, and being able to sign into EVERYTHING with our facebook login. You all DO realize you’re simply passing around your information to anyone who wants it. Your facebook privacy settings matter so little it’s ridiculous.

If you don’t have it in your real name you can still be found. If you don’t believe me google yourself and see what you find. Even google the name your facebook is under. You might be surprised with what’s out there and how easy it is for anyone to find it. Something else to consider of course is that there are many people who share names. So what you find about this name or that name may or may not be the same person. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if what you’re reading is about your friend or one of their namesakes.

My point here is not that we should simply give up protecting ourselves. I mean we all know identity theft is real and it can really suck sometimes. We all should be more mindful of the things we post on these sites and how many and what type of sites are you giving your personal information to at the drop of a hat. We can, for instance, use paypal to cut down on how many sites we enter credit card information into. Also, stop giving your work email address out on every tom, dick and harry’s website. It’s free to start a yahoo, hotmail, heck I bet you history buffs could even get an excite account.

My point here is not to scare you. The internet is an incredibly powerful tool that while itself is fairly accessible to many throughout the world (I wont be ignorant enough to say most when I don’t know that for sure) it’s power is in the many resources that are now more easily accessible than we’d ever dreamed they could be. Like with any powerful tool it’s important to learn how to use it properly and protect ourselves.