You share your life online. You can see what your friends and family are doing whenever you want. You can face to face talk for free with family across seas that once cost you a butt load of money to do non face to face. You can let the world know you arrived at a store and the store will reward you with something free or discounted. You allow companies to access (maybe you didn’t know that) your personal Facebook account information online that in turn gives you a custom experience designed just for you and your interests.
All these things are absolutely amazing. You stumble across new things now that you didn’t even know existed. We are more connected than ever in the history of the world.
With all of these amazing technologies, my question to you is this:
Has the awesomeness of technology changed your stance on privacy?
Even before social media took off – heck, even before the Internet – it wasn’t that hard for someone dedicated enough to find out your basic personal information. It just meant going down to the courthouse to look through public records, or even going through your trash or stealing your mail. Just looking through the phone book revealed a lot.
Of course, there are basic safeguards to protect your critical financial information, but I won’t insult your readers’ intelligence by going over them here. Suffice it to say, once you’re born, unless you immediately move to the wilderness to live off the land and off the grid, your privacy is compromised to one degree or another in our society.
To answer your question, I suppose I used to think I had some degree of privacy, but not anymore, and technology has made that even more obvious.
Interesting topic you bring up. Personally myself, I had always been a private person (working in investigations years ago made me that way) however that was long before social media and we had to do things the old way as Gerald has mentioned above.
In recent years, I have learned that you can find out almost anything about anyone through the internet. I blog, Independent musicians and all I have to do is type their name into google and I can find out almost anything I want.
One thing that did amaze me however, is that a friend sent me a link yesterday about pictures and how you can be traced back to the exact location that the picture was taken. That is a scary thought where children and people are concerned. How many times do people share pictures of their kids playing in the yard, first steps, or family BBQ. Are you selling items through the internet and you take a picture to show what the item is?
Here is the link of the ABC video to share with your followers:
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/video?id=7621105
If maybe just one person realizes how devastating the consquences could be, that might be one more life that we can save. I am a huge advocate on missing and exploited children. This is one way we might discourage those “stalkers” from finding children or maybe even you as their next victim.
In answer to your question, I know that I am not as private as I once was, but I still take precautions to ensure my families safety. Now if I could just explain that to my teenage son 😉