Blog # 7 - Privacy Online

With popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, it can be hard to protect your privacy online. Even if a profile is set to “Private” your posts can still be seen by the social media companies and your close followers, which really means that private posts can also potentially be seen by the rest of the world. We often hear, “Watch what you post online” or “It will never go away once you post it”, but what do these phrases really mean? 

It is obvious to most people that Social Media companies monetize their platforms through the activity of their end users.  You are their product, and your digital identity is being sold to advertisers who pay money to the social platforms to deliver targeted ads.  This is what keeps the social media applications free, so most people accept the trade-off.  But privacy concerns extend far beyond targeted advertising. In our increasingly politically binary society, people are looking for ways to shame or discredit others who may not be aligned to their political or social ideas. We are witnessing people losing friends, reputations and even their jobs because of things in their past that have been exposed on social media accounts. There are recent examples of people who have directly or indirectly supported a political cause and were subsequently targeted for retribution by their employer or even their government. All of your search history, comments, posts, online activity, likes, followers, etc. is available to be seen by others, and this digital fingerprint can strongly indicate whether or not you are acceptable to a certain group, say, your employer. 

Although it is important for people to check and adjust their privacy settings on their social platforms, doing so simply isn’t enough. Information has a way of getting out. The most important thing people should do to protect their privacy and online identity is to be mindful of their digital interactions including social posts and comments. One way to do this is to always be thinking “What if my future employer or spouse sees this?” I do not think there is much the government can do to protect individual privacy. There are already laws in place that prohibit sharing of personal data without consent, but there does not seem to be much enforcement around these.  It is every individual’s responsibility to be cautious about how they are using online platforms and what information they are sharing. The society we live in seems to be moving more in a direction where an opponent of yours might find one thing that you posted or said in your past, and amplify it in such a way that paints your whole identity and reputation in a negative light. Unfortunately, lives have been destroyed by this tactic. We don’t need to look far to find examples of it. Education is the key to protecting online privacy. Many schools are implementing such training as young as elementary school, but I think the best way to protect people of all ages is to educate them with more consistency about the potential future risk of their digital identity.