Is there any privacy on the internet anymore?

Privacy is a relatively common value among people, so digital privacy should be no exception. Digital privacy is important for many reasons including to avoid having your identity used or stolen, keep strangers from having access to personal information, and to avoid scams or fraud. “A common understanding of privacy is the right to determine when, how, and to what extent personal data can be shared with others,” (Internet Society website, 2015), and yet many of us still throw this right away for convenience. In today’s digital world, it is easier than ever to collect and use your personal information as we often are quick to share our information and save it for future convenience. A common example of this is when we agree to terms of service without actually reading it, as this often is us agreeing to give access to our personal information and anything we post.

An important and valuable digital skill to have is to be able to avoid digital threats such as hackers and scammers. According to the article How to Protect Your Digital Privacy in the Era of Public Shaming, ways that you can protect your privacy includes updating your software, making longer passwords, using secure communication techniques, protecting your mobile web browsing, keeping sensitive information securely locked away, avoid webcams, and opting out of data brokers (Angwin, 2017). To add on to this, I think that it is an important skill to be able to tell the difference between something real and something that is a scam, such as emails. I get hundreds to thousands of emails a day in one of my email accounts and the number of spam emails I receive is actually shameful. It would be very easy for tech savvy scam artists to hack into my personal information if I make one wrong move and click on the wrong link in one of these emails or on the ads that pop up, so being able to identify these fake advertisements and emails is an important skill to have.

I personally am not a fan of how smart internet users such as marketers are as I find it disturbing how fast they get my information. Something that I have experienced, as I am sure you can as well, is having ads of items or services that you were just looking at pop up on whatever platform you’re currently on. I can’t even count the number of times that the FashionNova shirt or Nike shoes I was just looking at pops up as an advertisement on Instagram or Facebook. This makes me think about how easily our information is passed along, and therefore how important it is to protect our privacy.