Privacy settings or not, once something is online it can be print screened, copied, pasted, and shared; there are many instances of celebrities and politicians learning this the hard way. The digital landscape offers us tremendous power to communicate, share ideas and debate various issues. This power can be used for good or bad, and it is important that people are reminded of this on a daily basis. The rise of social media in the past 10 years shows that people are willing and eager to share information about themselves online.
Most of the big social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are “free” but that is not necessarily true as you pay for these services with every comment and picture that you post and every page you like. In turn, all this information is then used to help advertisers target products to these users and it is only getting more and more refined. As these networks grow with more and more information and as bigger and faster computers are developed to process all this information, companies will be able to determine not only who wants what, but what people can have.
Just imagine a world were you get charged a higher premium for a car insurance because your online profile shows you like Formula 1, and videos of joy riders or you get refused a bank loan because your Facebook profile documents how much partying you did back in college? Privacy policies are important, so too is actually reading them, but more importantly is common sense. It is as simple as this — if you don’t want to share something with the whole world, then don’t put it online for everyone to see it.
— The reader is an Irish student based in Dublin, Ireland
