Oops… I guess I’m not safe!
How many things are we subscribed too? How many ads do we see per minute? How many of them do we click on? How long is our password? Is it a safe password or just east to memorize? The scary part about digital media is that we are never safe. There is always a possibility of being hacked, identity theft, or as far as a real threat to our lives. That’s pretty scary to me. How safe are we being online?
Digital privacy is so important for the reasons listed above. The truth is we’re not safe even when we think we are. We are being tracked by every little move we make online. It’s also important to limit our personal information that is saved online without any protection if we do end up getting hacked somehow.
The article How to Protect Your Digital Privacy in the Era of Public Shaming lists examples of ways that we could protect our digital privacy. I took away some really important points to help protect myself online. Updating software, making passwords longer, opting out of data brokers, and deleting some data were some of the suggestions listed in the article (Angwin, 2017). Something that I started doing years ago was using a few different emails dedicated to different things. My school email is only for school related things, I have a personal email, and I have a junk email. This helps me have a clear idea of what is important and what is not. My emails do not get mixed up and I don’t worry about all my information being hacked at once. This reminds me of the Hillary Clinton email incident that happened a few years ago. The article Hillary Clinton must testify in email case, judge rules writes that Clinton was ordered to testify “at a deposition for a lawsuit related to her use of a private email server for involving official business while working as secretary of State under President Barack Obama” (Mangan, 2020). This was a big scandal that caused a lot of issues, which reminds us the importance of digital privacy and being very careful of every move we make.
Something that surprised me from the readings this week was how careless I have been about reading the terms of contracts. I usually think of reading that as a total waste of time. I mean, who has time to read all those pages of things that don’t make any sense when we could just skip through it and click agree. The article Do You Read Terms Of Service Contracts? Not many Do, Research Shows reminded me the importance of reading the terms of service (NPR, 2016). By unknowingly clicking agree we might be getting ourselves into something we don’t want.
We have to know that we are never a 100% in anything we do online, but there are ways that we could decrease our chances of being hacked like making our passwords safe, and not just easy.
