Can We Really Be Private Anymore?

After reading and discussing The New York Times‘ article by Steve Lohr, titled “How Privacy Vanishes Online,” I strongly believed that anyone who put information on the Internet had only themselves to blame for his or her lack of privacy.

Even though the article made that point that while one person may not disclose his or her personal information, someone else may disclose personal information about this person. While this did not initially resonate with me, yesterday I realized that this could very well be the case for many people.

A few days ago, one of my male friends was “tagged” in a bunch of Facebook photos kissing another guy. Six of my friends and I noticed these pictures and began talking

Facebook

about them. At the time only three of the seven of us knew that our friend was gay and was dating the guy he was kissing in the photos. After much talking, wondering, and confusion, my friend came out of the closet to the four of us who did not know that he was gay.

My friend had no intention of these photographs ever hitting the Internet, let alone Facebook, where all of his friends and family could see the pictures. He also had no intention of telling anyone but the three people he had told and his boyfriend that he is gay.

When he found out through one of our friends that the pictures were on Facebook, he immediately asked his boyfriend to “untag” the pictures. His boyfriend did so, but the damage was already done.

This entire ordeal with my friend made me realize that as a result of the Internet, our privacy has truly vanished. Even if we, personally, do not disclose any information or post any pictures on the Internet about ourselves, someone else can. While writing this blog entry, I also remembered an incident that occurred a few years ago.

During my freshman year of college, a website existed ((it no longer does)) that allowed people to post pictures of other people and rate people on their looks, smarts, and promiscuousness. For some reason, my picture showed up on this website and I was rated “10” for looks, “2” for smarts, and “10” for promiscuousness. Obviously, these ratings are extremely skewed. But, the website had my full name and was searchable through Google. Thus, anyone ((my parents, professors, friends, and employers)) could type in my name and see all of this false information!  I felt extremely violated and as though I had no privacy.

I think this situation with the Internet is unfortunately inevitable. I wonder if it is going to get worse with  the increasing use and creation of various social media and networking sites.