Blog #7 Privacy, Online & Off

 

The issues surrounding social media impact not only myself but my family and friends. Everyone's personal privacy and information are at risk of being stolen and or compromised. Everything now is saved on a phone such as health records, location information, addresses, passwords, and even financial data. Having all of this is a significant risk of identity theft, financial loss, as well as emotional stress from it all. This raises a safety flag for everyone who is involved. The privacy of a family can be invaded if one person has location services which leads to data and personal details being leaked. Location and private information being leaked has an increased reality of being cyberbullied or being physically harmed. Back to how these issues affect me, they affect me socially. If one of my friends decided to post something of a sensitive nature about me without my consent that would cause mega strain on our relationship because you never know who will see things and where they will get sent to. This causes a feeling of betrayal from your friend and it comes along with feelings of anxiety because you never know whos looking at and sharing posts.

With all of these issues arising the question becomes "what should the government be doing about these issues?" The government truthfully needs to take one singular huge step in this battle that will potentially fix everything. The government should enact and enforce four sets of rules. The first is a bulletproof set of privacy laws that will hold companies liable and accountable for the ways they store, collect, and use their user's personal data. This hypothetically should come along with expensive fines and penalties to deter them from continuing with this behavior. Two, the government should make companies be required to provide transparency about the way they conduct their data practices to inform users clearly about why and how their data is being used. Third the government should provide updated education on how the people should protect themselves from certain companies and getting their information stolen. And lastly, the government should establish an oversight group to monitor and regulate companies' usage of personal data to ensure that everyone's privacy rights are respected and upheld.

The newest concern to tackle is how are we supposed to protect ourselves from privacy invasions. The greatest way to protect yourself from an invasion of privacy is to not share what you don't want known. Everyone now feels the need to post and take a photo of everything they're doing in their day-to-day life. This is an extremely dangerous practice because you may take a photo of your latte with the store label on the cup and bam people know where you are and when. Being mindful is what needs to be practiced in this scenario because anything can be seen by anyone at any given time. If someone absolutely feels the need to post about their lattes the least they could do to protect themselves from privacy invasions is to review all privacy settings. Setting your account to private and going through your followers is a good start to limit the personal information shared publicly. To protect your accounts you should use a different password for everything and ensure it is considered strong. A two-factor authentication goes along greatly with this if you want a second layer or protection.