Assignment 5--Someone might be watching

Own a facebook or myspace, maybe even a blog? Keep your photos on webshots or other Internet photo printing sites? Have you ever wondered who might be looking at you, examining you, or even reading up on your life? Privacy on the Internet doesn't really exist, it has no boundaries or rules. According to wikipedia.org, privacy is "the ability of an individual or group to keep their lives and personal affairs out of public view, or to control the flow of information about themselves." Privacy is possible in our everyday lives, we do it all the time, whether it is dancing in our rooms, showering, singing obnoxiously in our cars, or even just talking on the phone, we all want our privacy and most of the time respect others privacy. But it is possible to do so online? Most of us would say, "yeah, I'm safe. My facebook/myspace is set to private so no one except my friends are able to view it." Well, good for you! You have that one under control. But what about the pictures your friends put up of you? Those are able to be viewed by their friends who you may or may not even know. Those pictures can be copied and within minutes be flying around the Internet with your name attached. Don't feel so safe now, do you?



Here's a scary story that I experienced with online privacy. When I was a sophomore in high school, myspace had just made its first real impact on high school students. Knowing that it was going to be the next big thing, I immediately made one. Being naive I instantly started accepting people as friends so my number would be higher, strangers and all. One man imparticular started leaving me comments. I found them flattering but ignored them. A week or two later I began getting phone calls to my cell phone. An older man would call and hum into the phone then hang up. I found it strange and told my friends. My boyfriend at the time tried to scare him off with threats whenever he called but it almost became a joke between my friends cause he was doing no harm to me it just started to become annoying. Within that week, someone with an unfamiliar screen name IMed me and told me that he had met me in the bathroom, when I asked him to leave me alone he said "no, you leave me alone you started talking to me". I found this very strange and after putting all these weird instances together, I finally told my parents. We looked at this older mans myspace together and found out that he was forty five years old. He posted my pictures in his profile and had me set as his top friend. He wrote weird stuff in his "about me" section talking about how he thought he had found the love of his life. In an instant my parents picked up the phone and called the police. After questioning and many investigations that took what seemed like years, they finally found the guy. He claimed to have gotten my phone number from one of my friends walls after I had posted it. My screen name was posted on my own profile and he simply just copy and pasted my photos from my profile onto his. He was charged and a restraining order was placed against him.

To this very day I still don't believe this happened to me. Of course I deleted my myspace from the internet and a couple years later got sucked right back into the trend and made myself a myspace. I am more careful of what I do online now. I have it set to private, I don't give out any information of where I live, my number, my email address, my hometown, or anything of the sort. I think about my privacy a lot while going online. I look at other peoples profiles and wonder why they aren't set to private. With the amount of pictures people put in their profiles and the ratio of sober to drunk pictures, it puzzles me as to why they are even posted for the world to see. Recently I heard that smaller colleges were using facebook as a source to kick students out of the their facilities if need be.

My home town is very small and a few months ago a bunch of 7th grade girls got busted by their families for posting sexual pictures on the internet. I would never want to embarrass my family on the internet by posting things that would disappoint them in me. Today the amount of access strangers have to our online 'private' things is getting a bit ridiculous.

The privacy online that once made people feel safe is quickly going extinct.