Week 14: Online privacy

In this blog I will be discussing online privacy... or lack of it. The last article I wrote about mentioned our digital footprints. What it didn't mention were the many companies walking right behind and observing those footprints. The most noticeable part of all of the controversy in my opinion is the data that companies who run ads have on me.

Facebook was recently called out for stealing all kinds of info from us and it wasn't only taken from our searches and posts, but from others things like posts we write and don't post, search history, and even things we do when we aren't on facebook. They did this for the monetary gains they received from companies that wanted this precious data. Facebook isn't the only company doing this though. Thousands of companies are selling our data for profit and there isn't much we can do about it. A scary detail of this is that these companies gather so much information about us that they are able to infer things about us like sexual orientation and drug use. That is insane and scary to be quiet honest. It doesn't help that many people disclose this information on their own but either way these companies can get virtually any data that they want. That's why it blows my mind when I'll search something random then next thing I know, I'm getting an advertisement for that same thing on instagram. This actually just happened to me the other day, I saw an advertisement for a training program that looked interesting to me and clicked into the website, read a little about it and moved on. This program happened to be specific to basketball players. I haven't played basketball since eight grade and never search it. Not even an hour later I go back onto instagram... I get six different basketball training advertisements in a row.


It's unbelievable and quite frightening how much of our private info is being passed around from company to company. People need to keep in mind that there is no such thing as privacy on the internet.

companies are spying on us
companies are buying and sharing our personal data