My Online Presence

With an unspecified end to quarantine, we remain inside and connected to technology. I am online every day for classes as well as keeping myself entertained with watching movies and tv shows. I am also up to date on social media in order to stay in touch with my friends and family in different parts of the world. Normally I don’t have much of a large online footprint. I don’t have a personal website other than this blog for class. I am on social media; however, I go on Snapchat at night, I sometimes go on Instagram, and I never really check Facebook. On snapchat, I usually send one picture to my friends and family at night just to keep my streaks. On Instagram, I post pictures of big events or even pictures of my friends and family. The only time I used Facebook was for one of my classes to comment on Nido Qubein School of Communication posts. The big footprint I have when it comes to technology is for schoolwork, messaging my family when I’m away at college, and LinkedIn. The information that a visitor could glean about me, even indirectly, by visiting my pages on social media would be my name, where I go to school, what state I live in, who my family and friends are, and what events I am involved in, just to name a few things they would discover. The private information I have voluntarily given out when applying to social media sites like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook was my phone number, e-mail address, and birthday. The private information I voluntarily given out to LinkedIn was my phone number, e-mail, and state in which I reside in. I gave my private information out to these sites because it was required to include this information in order to set up an account. 

In a recent article in Fast Company, a 14-year-old girl “unplugged” from social media.  Sonia Bokhari wasn’t really interested in social media, and since she didn’t have a smartphone and wasn’t allowed to join any sites at all until she was 13, it wasn’t much of an issue for her to not be connected. When she finally got connected to social media, she disappointingly saw that her mother and sister posted embarrassing photos from her childhood for all their followers to see. She thought she was beginning her public online life; however, there were already hundreds of pictures and stories of her online that she didn’t have control over. She felt like her privacy was violated. I understand why she feels that way considering her mother quoted her and posted many embarrassing photos; however, her mother may have thought she was capturing a memorable moment of her child and wanted to share it with the world. As stated in the article, we shouldn’t post negative or inappropriate pictures because it could affect our school life and future job opportunities. A big mistake Bokhari made with social media was that they were all public. Unlike Bokhari, all my accounts are private, and I only follow people that I know. 

Not many people know how Facebook actually works and how it makes its money, profiting from invading our online privacy. “Facebook uses information about their behaviors and friendships to deduce a constantly updating list of their interests” (Madrigal, 2019). If it knows what people are interested in, it can put ads in front of them to encourage them to purchase the product. About 50% of Americans would feel uncomfortable with Facebook’s business practices. I don’t really use Facebook, so I haven’t stopped to think too much about what I have on the social media network and what information I’ve given the company. The only information that they could get about me is the personal information I had to put in when setting up an account. Facebook and occasionally other social media networks make me feel that our personal information and privacy is not taken into consideration because companies will do whatever it takes to make a profit. “Two publicly accessible caches of Facebook user data created third-party applications that connected to the Facebook platform” (Gallagher, 2019). With that being said, Facebook asked some users for their email address and email password in order to register accounts. This makes people wonder about the lack of safety and privacy violations that Facebook has committed. 

Related Articles:
Fast Company
The Atlantic
ars technica