Online Privacy

In A privacy paradox: Social Networking in the United States, Barnes focuses on what she refers to as the 'privacy paradox': the contrast between teenagers willing to share intimate information online and government agencies and companies collecting data. Throughout the article, Barnes holds a specific interest in teenagers and their usages of these social networking websites. The following infographic provides an aesthetic overview of what teenagers share online and with whom:

As a teenager, I can relate to this privacy paradox. Admittedly, my Facebook profile contains a lot of personal information, such as where I live and what school I attend. I also own blogs on Tumblr, where I keep journal-like entries that catalog my inner thoughts and daily excursions. While I am willing to share this information online, my father is constantly surprised with the amount of his personal information he finds online. As a public school teacher, my father is considered an employee of the state. The state government keeps an online database that stores the salary of every state education employee, and my father was appalled to find that his salary was on the Internet for the whole world to see without his consent. In a frenzy, my father Googled himself and found even more of his personal information online, such as his address, previous locations of residency, the value of his home, and the individuals he lives with. While my father is an avid Internet user, his online activity is mainly constituted of checking email and consuming any content related to Jeremy Lin - he does not own any social media accounts. For my father, he is taken aback by the disparity between the amount of his personal information that he uploads onto the Internet and the amount that can be found on the Internet.

I am hesitant to believe that teenagers are unaware of the public nature of the internet, which is what Barnes argues. I believe that this may be due to the fact that this article was written in 2006 - almost 7 years ago. When I first began using the Internet more frequently, I remember many reminders about ‘cyber safety’, such as campaigns at school and NBC's To Catch A Predator. These efforts are examples of social solutions that Barnes proposes near the end of the article. Personally, I feel that these efforts have reduced the amount of information teenagers willingly provide online; I grew up knowing that I shouldn't post my home address or social security number on the Internet. I feel that teenagers nowadays are aware of how public the internet is but have these erroneous assumptions about the social platforms and their default privacy settings, which leads to more personal information exposure than intended. That is, teenagers don't think that the Internet is private; they think the platforms they use are private by default - which is not true amongst popular platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

Even if teenagers were more careful about the personal information put online, can we even be sure that their personal information won't find its way online somehow? Barnes also brings up this interesting point in her article and asks "In an age of digital media, do we really have any privacy?"

I believe that as the role technology plays in our lives becomes larger, our privacy diminishes. Because digital media overlaps so many sectors of our lives, I believe that everything we do leaves a footprint somewhere - both intentionally and unintentionally. Consider the anecdote I gave earlier involving my father.  Something like his salary ends up on the Internet because the usage of the Internet has extended into organizing state information. Something as simple as using a credit card to pay for groceries catalogs where you were at a given time and what you purchased in a database somewhere. If you go somewhere with a friend and he or she decides to tweet about what you two are doing and where, where you were at a given time and who you were with is now recorded on a database somewhere. Essentially, everything - what you do, who you’re with, where you are - has the potential to become public. That begs the question: is privacy even attainable?

The following video ponders a similar question: