As media progresses, I feel that protecting my privacy in the eye of the media is becoming progressively harder to do. We have all heard the joke that our “FBI agent” is always watching what we are doing and knows just as much about our life, if not more, than what we do. I am sure most of us has had a conversation, or searched a topic on Google, and then the next time we enter a social media platform, there are advertisements for whatever we were just searching for. This is done through monitoring and internet service providers. This allows for companies to collect data about what you’re searching for and how long you are spending on different websites, and adapt advertisments towards your usage data. Some of us like when this happens for convenience, and other find this increasingly frustrating and somewhat disturbing. There are ways for us to increase our privacy when we get a new app or a new form of technology, but if you’re like me, you’re honestly just too lazy to read the fine print. Whenever I see the long page of Terms and Conditions, instead of reading it, I just scroll to the bottom and click I agree to the terms and conditions, accepting whatever is written within the fine print.
To protect your privacy, there are many steps that can be taken. According to Potter (2016), just a few steps that can be taken are to: take an inventory of what information about you is publicly available and mapping your information by privacy levels. One way to see what information about you is publicly available, websites like PeekYou.com, Intellius.com, and Snitch.name can be used. When visiting these websites, all you need to do is type in your name and see what information is easily available about you. Another thing to do is to check on your privacy settings and debate if you want the settings to be purely personal, limited sharing, and public. Just by taking these two steps alone, we can increase our personal media privacy.
Amanda's Blog 