Digital Privacy
When talking about privacy, we learn that there are many different ways to describe it depending on your culture and how you viewed it. For me, when I think of privacy, I would say that I have always been someone to be very careful with my accounts and have changed my settings in order to prevent random people from viewing it. I have only wanted people who I am familiar with to see my personal information. One thing that I didn’t have much of an awareness of until this week, is that when you sign up to any social network you are giving websites and apps access to all of your information. You accept all of these terms and basically are saying that you trust other people to access info into your life. I never really paid attention to reading any of the contracts because they were always too long. I assumed that by accepting it, that I would be able to create a safe account.
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Digital privacy is important because it allows you to protect your personal information and your identity. When you think about digital privacy, it is everything to do with your life. Today we see how data is shared and being distributed so quickly. The internet is evolving so fast which is leading to a lot of digital privacy issues. With that being said, people are still continuing to share their personal life on their social media platforms and exposing too much. I know I have definitely exposed a lot of my life by joining all of the various networks. I think often we aren’t worried about our privacy because we don’t see it affecting our lives. The problem is that although it may not be harming us now, we never know when someone could take our information and change our lives. There are so many ways that people have been affected or hacked because they were not protecting their identity.
In the article, How to protect your digital privacy in the era of public shaming, talks about how “the government can spy on much of the globe’s internet traffic” which is insane. It is crazy to know how easily someone can know so much about our lives. I think it is so important to know what we can do to prevent threats and getting hacked. The article talked about a lot of things but I just want to talk about two which are updating software and making passwords longer. Hackers are typically able to figure out passwords that are eight letters or less. You want to make it hard for individuals to hack your accounts. Updating your software is so important because it allows for your phone or computer to get rid of any bugs or viruses.
The article below called “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did” talked about how this retail store is studying their customers and looking at what they buy and what coupons are going to make them most happy. They were able to analyze and send coupons for baby items to customers based on their pregnancy scores. One time, they got a complaint from a man who was angry asking why Target sent her coupons for baby clothes when she was in high school. It turned out she was pregnant and he had no idea. After reading the article, it shows how easily retail stores are able to take data from us and reveal information that someone may not want to disclose. Target was able to figure out that customers found it creepy to know that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.
