Who has an online access to a personal information about me? My friends and me! …and the rest of the world.
Nowadays we live our life more online, than offline. We have a number of accounts all over the Internet – on social media, forums, blogs, online communities. And our details and photos are if not on all, then on most of these accounts. The problem, however, is not that our personal information and our whole life are online. It is that we believe that we still have the control. When we don’t.
I, personally, have accounts on social media, website for blogging, websites for creative work and so on. I have made the decision to put my two names and a profile picture on all of my accounts. Other details, such as nationality, age and location – on some of them. And almost everything that I could ever put online, on my Facebook profile. Why? Because this is the only social media, that allows me to choose who sees what. And exactly this has made me believe that I have the control and have nothing to worry about. But have you ever tried to type your names in Google? I did.
It is frustrating. It is scary. I wrote my name in the Google search bar and apparently my whole online life came out. Links to all of my accounts, my photos in the ‘images’ section.. Simply everything. This made me rethink my whole activity, especially on social media. I do not feel safe anymore. And the fact that anyone at any time can access private data, which I do not want to be accessed by strangers, scares me a lot.
And the question is not how and why is our personal information all over the Internet. Because the answer is obvious. We all know that onc you put something online, it stays there forever and you lost the control. So the question is
What makes us trust the cyberspace to this extent? How exactly do they make us believe that we do have the control? ..when we don’t…
Network Society and the Media 
I like the questions you posed at the end of your post!
I agree with what you said about our lives being online these days rather than offline, thats quite sad! i cant deny that my head is always in my phone, but it really is the easiest way to keep up to date with everything and find out about places/use maps etc.
I don’t think we necessarily trust cyberspace, i just think we want to be apart of what everyone else is apart of so we don’t miss out. We know the dangers and maybe we are just being naive to these at times as we thing bad things could never happen to use; for example online trolling and stalking. In relation to the question about them making us believe we have control: i think because there are so so many options when singing up to something online maybe we feel that the big media corporations care about our safety and it makes us feel like its ok to maybe not tick every privacy box as we have already declined our consent for 85% of the things. Maybe thats why we feel like we are in control?
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I completely agree with this, I don’t think anyone with a social networking account is altogether exempt from online visibility and loss of control. This worries me too, you can find information on yourself so easily just by doing a Google Search. I’m not sure what makes us trust cyberspace to this extent, but maybe because we are given the choice to change our privacy settings and decline anything we aren’t comfortable with, and it gives us a false sense of security?
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I agree with your idea. Social media is not private. Apart from the images in Google, social networking also have your phone number and email account. Everything you have searched and you chatted are recorded. Privacy is just like a joke. But if there is no bad influence to your life, I believe the happiness you have is more than the troubles.
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I like the idea you share. I think, once you’re surrounded by your friends online, it makes you think you’re safe, but it’s not quite true. The more information you share online, the bigger is the chance that it will be shared and you will get into an unpleasant situation. So it’s not about THEM making us trust, it’s all about ourselves. Our own safety if in our own hands.
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