Showing posts with label online privacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online privacy. Show all posts

Monday, February 25, 2008

Go Online? What about my privacy?




I remember this was the constant question my grandma kept asking in response to her more modern friends' invitation to be like them and have some kind of online activity. She thought that in the big www world, everyone is spying on everyone. All emails are read and inspected by a third party. Any picture that is posted online is guaranteed to be viewed by an intruder or a hacker stalker. That's how she looked at it and is still maintaining this view as her internet iron curtain.

If you ask me, I almost don't blame her. She heard many many stories about other people's "online mistakes" that didn't quite give her the brightest image of this international network. One of them happened to a young fellow in the neighborhood a few days before getting married to his beloved fiancee'. It occurred to her; "Maybe I should dig into some of my lover's past." She goes on facebook, sees this 4-years old video of him getting drunk with a bunch of girls, and changes her mind on him.

Now I say 'almost' at the beginning of the previous paragraph because I think my grandma is past this fear of losing someone at this phase of her life. I also think that the above story is not a total indication of the privacy invasion problem on the net. It's more of an indication of the guy's stupidity not setting his privacy settings in a way that is congruent with his culture; a culture in which it's NOT acceptable to get drunk and lose it for a while.

But don't you think that even with privacy protection switches, there still might be threats on one's privacy and reputation? I don't know ....
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