Blog 7: Invasion of Privacy

As I grow older, my privacy and the privacy of others around me is slowly thinning little by little, until we are left with no privacy at all. Big corporations like Facebook sell millions and millions of people’s information and identity to third party applications and companies, just so they could make a quick profit. The sad thing is that not a lot of people understand what these big apps do with our information. Take Snapchat for example, where every picture you send is “gone forever” or gone 24 hours after being posted. What Snapchat doesn’t tell you or its users is that every single picture or video you take, whether it is sent to someone or instantly deleted, is saved in Snapchat’s database FOREVER. These issues affect me because I feel as if I don’t and never will have 100% privacy, and most likely no one else does either. My father constantly tells me to never use my actual email or full name for certain services. He’s a part of the IT world, so he has a better understanding of what goes on with this data of people that's stored.

“What should the government be doing about these issues”? I believe the government is the main culprit behind this lack of privacy. They want the most intricate piece of information of all their citizens, that way it is easier to catch somebody who commits a crime or help find a missing person. Those reasons are fine, but to bombarde me with ads of a product I searched once, or to forcefully show me ads of products I VERBALLY spoke about in person, that is crossing the line in my opinion. What the government should do is ease the control of privacy of its citizens. I believe the government does need this information for its people, but the amount of information and what they are actually storing is too much. 

The best thing we as citizens can do to better protect ourselves is to stay alert and aware. Never sign
up for something without reading the terms and conditions. Never put your real information for an application you don’t 100% trust. One of the most important things, watch what you say on social media. Content posted on the internet is never fully erased, it could always come back to haunt you.