Privacy in a Digital Age

 Living in a time where most things we do are digital, it is very important to take our privacy and safety, both on and offline into consideration. After our lecture and watching the videos on privacy, I was shocked just how much of our information is always being tracked. Once Professor Smith put it into perspective for us that these businesses are here basically to track our web usage and invade our privacy and use an "Adhesion Contract", where one party owns the power, that creeped me out. Whether we realize it or not, these companies like Google, Facebook, or Instagram are always tracking us. They control any activity we did, or what we posted and once it's there, they legally own it and store it as a data point. It is super important to think about what we do online, because even if we click on one thing, that is tracked forever, as well as how long we stay on that site. By signing up for these services, we give these sites permission to put things on our devices, whether we realize it or not. It is important that we are aware of what sites can access certain information about us and that we limit the data these sites can get. I always knew that it was a problem, but this really put it into perspective for me. One of the weirdest parts to me was how ads and algorithms track what we search in order to send advertisements to us, based upon what we search. The collection and retention of this data is done in a very secret way, and they are always collecting our data without us realizing. Sometimes this happens because our phones listen to us without our knowledge. It is important to be aware of things like this happening and to not share personal information online, unless it is on a very secure site and browser.

Image from: https://campuspress.yale.edu/tribune/internet-privacy-matters/