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- Items people post on Facebook, and on the internet in general, are never private.
by Connor Vasu
In the online world, there is no such thing as privacy. Everything you search, everything you post and everything you “tweet” is forever imprinted onto the internet. Because of these facts, students should be careful about what they post on the internet.
Search something on Google? Google saves the results, and uses them to personalize advertisements. Even if you clear your history, Google and other internet browsers save your search results. Therefore, your privacy is compromised.
Facebook is like Google, but with even worse privacy standards. If you have a Facebook account, Facebook saves personal information from your account to sell to advertisers. Advertisers use this personal information to make advertisements personal. However, sharing information means that your name, sex and profile picture is available to anyone on the internet thanks to Facebook.
Saving consumer’s history is a bad privacy standard. Your personal information should not be spread to the four corners of the web, instead it should be kept personal. When you click “private,” it should actually be private, not available to advertisers and to Facebook.
Do you really want total strangers who may or may not have a Facebook account looking at thousands of your personal photographs and your personal information? Even if your profile is private, people can still find out things about you. Advertisers can still see your private information.
Online privacy is an oxymoron in itself, because there is nothing private about the internet. So, consider that everything you write online can be viewed by anyone with access to a computer. If you do not want everyone in the world to see what you write, do not write it on the internet.