Privacy, Online & Off - How It Impacts Us All

 By James Hoban

With the digital age continuing to grow on a daily basis, it has more of an impact on our lives every single day. We grow more connected with the internet with every click or touch of a button. Website use is often if not always tracked and logged so that advertisers and third party companies can use that info in an attempt to sell you a product or service. While this is quite common, it is not always the intended purpose for the companies doing this data mining. A lot of the time with companies like Facebook and other popular sites with internet users, the information that they save to their databases is used for more than just advertising. There have been cases with not only Facebook but also with Twitter and Instagram where the government becomes involved and needs to take a look at your private, archived information in an attempt to connect certain people to ongoing investigations and other instances like that. This isn't the most common use of the information that is being stored on us but nonetheless, we should be made more aware for the information about us being kept and used by these companies for various reasons. 

As mentioned before, the most common use for the storage of our personal data is to give us personalized ads, for things that these media services believe we would want or need, based on our previous searches and areas of interest. Say you were looking at videos of cats or how you should best take care of a new cat or kitten. YouTube or Facebook can take these recent searches, and based on what you have searched, in this case being new cat care, you will begin to see ads and video suggestions for things like litter boxes, and what type of cat crates are comfortable and friendly for young cats. This can be useful to many of us for seeing things we didn't know we needed to see, but at the same time, brings a level of insecurity and exposure into our personal lives that some people may not be comfortable sharing with a large media coorpertation like Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.