Blog Post #9

This week in class we talked about how the government and social media companies invade our privacy everyday. A few examples of this our when you are on your computer or cell phone and you search the internet for winter coats, after a while you will notice that there are winter coat ads on the majority of the websites you visit. I have noticed things like this over the years, but never thought much about it because I have known for years that the government monitors us all very closely, even though we may not see them do it. Nevertheless, I found it interesting to actually have a dialogue about it and see how much we can find about ourselves on the internet.

So how big of an online footprint do I have? When I first thought about this question I thought about the fact that I have been on Instagram since the age of 12 or 13 and I am now 20 and have only posted 9 things on my account. I also have not posted on Instagram in over a year. Next, I thought about Facebook. I have had a Facebook account for about the same amount of time as Instagram, but I post even less on there. I have pictures and videos on my Facebook, but were posted many years ago and I haven't posted another of myself in over 5 years. However, I know you can easily find my family members through my Facebook. The only social media account of mine that I was slightly worried about, is Twitter. I use Twitter a lot and it is by far my favorite social media platform. Even when it comes to Twitter, I don't tweet very much, at least not anymore. Up until this past summer, I used to tweet anywhere from 3-10 times a day, some days even more. Something happened to me over the summer that will forever impact my life. This thing left me with a lot of time to just think and reflect on where I wanted my life to go. During this time I thought of the many negative things I had allowed to take over my life and tweeting so much about things that people don't need to know about me was one of those things, so I worked hard to stop it and now I tweet maybe twice a week, but that was after I went months without tweeting over the summer.

After reviewing my social media accounts, you can gather that I play/love basketball, attend High Point University, take pictures, I am a member of a fraternity at school, my brother does music, and I have few friends, but the ones I have are basically family, what middle school and high school I attended, and when and where I was born. There is probably much more information that one could uncover if they were to go through all of my Twitter posts. I personally think it is insane that the government can watch us like this, but I also see why its necessary and that is to secure the country, but I don't know what from. While you can find a lot of information about me online, there is a lot less about me out there then there are of other people. My picture does not come up when you look m up on google images, which is good and there are a lot of people who cannot say the same. Just be careful out there, you never know who is watching. You can inform yourself on your rights and many other things on websites like this: Learn more about the governments internet privacy rights