This set of articles reminded me of a recent episode of Note To Self, one of my favorite podcasts, where they discussed the possibility that our phones might quite literally be listening in on us. Most of us are contently floating along in cyberspace, unknowingly hemorrhaging data with every button press and mouse click. It takes something out of the ordinary to make us pause and step back to look at the bigger picture. I experienced one of these moments recently.
At work, I was ordering stickers in bulk. I perused several sites to price compare, decided on the company with the best deal, sent off my order, and life went on. The next day, as I was checking my personal Instagram account, I noticed something strange: an embedded ad for the site I just ordered the stickers from. I had never been to this site before yesterday, and I only looked at it while I was on work at a work computer. I understand this happened because I was logged into several personal accounts on my work computer including Facebook (who owns Instagram), but the experience made me pause. If it's that easy to connect my personal and work lives online, how should/will I handle this when I'm employed in a more serious job?
So I'm faced with a problem but no solution. How can we better protect ourselves online without being Mr. Robot levels of computer genius? As the Medium article states, younger generations clearly care about this issue. Far more so than the older generations, we're the ones that are going to have to live with the ramifications of our previous actions. Most of us have posting online since we were children with our first social media accounts. While my parents younger selves remain private and inaccessible other than what they choose to share, my old MySpace bulletins from 7th grade are probably still somewhere out there waiting to cause me embarrassment. I suppose the first step to remedying this is to, as addicting as they are, stop taking those Buzzfeed quizzes.
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