Privacy Concerns – Social Media and Digital Cultures

The Race for Attention

The race for attention is nothing new. People like being noticed and they being paid attention to. This has been true since before history was recorded. What is new, is that the race for attention is now being fought virtually by tech companies. Our mobile devices now demand more of our attention than we ever demanded or tried to achieve from other people. Our time is being spent not with people, but with our phones as we check our notifications, social media posts and play online games.

Tristan Harris in his TED talk “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day” mentions how that race for attention is changing our world, our conversations and our relationships including how we want to have them. I completely agree. People no longer know how to talk to anyone else unless it is through a device. The art of conversation is starting to disappear.

It is not rare to go to dinner with friends and have everyone get their phones out after the food is ordered and check in with social media, notifications, emails, texts, etc. People are addicted to checking their notifications, checking their email and making sure they are “not missing anything” when in fact, they are missing IRL (in real life) interaction.

Most people joke that “Google owns me” but it is not really a joke. Mark Stone wrote in a Techvibes article “ Google Owns You. But You Already Knew That, Right?” describing just how much of our personal information Google owns. The other tech companies are no different.

People have become complacent about lack of online data privacy and the amount of time and effort social media demands. This complacency is creating a vicious cycle where tech companies are becoming more and more persuasive and learning better techniques so that we will give them more of our attention. As we give them attention we have less attention for our IRL.

Tristan Harris proclaims that “we need new models and accountability systems. So that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time” the “goals of the persuader must align with the goals of the persuadee” and be accountable and transparent to what we want. We need to lose our complacency and group together to demand those new models and accountability. It is not ok to lose ourselves to the virtual world at the expense of our relationships in the real world.

What are your thoughts on the race for attention? Do think people understand the amount of time they spend online?

The Price of Privacy: What Are You Paying for Your Online Choices?

I find it rather counter-intuitive that my very first blog happens to be about online privacy. I’ve shied away from blogs for so many years because they seemed too personal. I wasn’t ready to put my thoughts out there on the Internet. Yet, this week I’ve learned that I’ve put so much more of myself out there already without giving it much thought.

I use Facebook. I like to think that I’m a fairly savvy user of the site, reviewing my settings often, marking my photos as “friends only” instead of “public,” and requiring my permission for someone to tag me in a photo or post on my timeline. As an Internet user, you may feel the same way I do: you know what you are doing and are at least somewhat in control. You know you are giving up a little bit of privacy for the convenience of the many free applications you use on a regular basis. We all use free applications. They enable us to socialize, save money, and make life more convenient in so many ways. But are they really free? Are you paying for them with your privacy by handing over more information than you realize?

Data mining has become a huge industry, and data collection is widespread in the United States. Data brokers use data, such as public social media profiles and data from your purchases to provide information to marketers and put you in target categories. This means that each piece of data is not anonymous, but associated with you specifically and can be used for profiling – to create a sort of picture of who you are and what you want. To give you an idea of scope, one data broker for Facebook has information on almost all of the households in the U.S. and $1 trillion in consumer transactions. Another data broker associated with Facebook, has information on 500 million consumers world-wide and about 1,500 data points per person.

Of course, the privacy concerns go far beyond just Facebook. Much of your online activity, such as search activity, is saved and can be sold to or used by third parties. Linking multiple accounts by using your Facebook or Google sign-on to create a new account exacerbates the problem of privacy. For the convenience of using your existing sign-on, you are connecting a variety of applications and providing more insight for profiling.

So what can you do to at least get back a little bit of your privacy? The article, How to Protect Your Privacy and Remove Data from Online Services, suggests a number of actions that you can take. I felt the following were simple and effective enough to use as a starting point:

Check your privacy settings in all of your apps and social media sites.
Remove old accounts.
Register with an alternate email address.
Set your browser to browse in private mode.

It can be overwhelming to think about all of the information you are sharing online and what to do about it. There are many benefits to being online so going “off grid” is not a feasible answer for most of us. However, you should do some research on unfamiliar apps and sites, err on the side of caution when sharing information or giving apps access to your personal data, and pause before you post anything online to think about if it really needs to be out there. Remember, just because an app or site is free, that does not mean that you aren’t paying for it one way or another.

Matteo, V. (2018, January 3). Facebook and Data Mining. TurboFuture. Available at: https://turbofuture.com/internet/How-Facebook-Collects-and-Sells-Your-Data [Accessed 2 Sep. 2019].

Howell, D. (2015, April 22) How to Protect Your Privacy and Remove Data from Online Services. TechRadar. Available at: https://www.techradar.com/news/internet/how-to-protect-your-privacy-and-remove-data-from-online-services-1291515 [Accessed 2 Sep. 2019]

Safety, Security, and Privacy

I grew up feeling like I was safe and had privacy when I needed it. If the doors were locked at night, we were safe. If I needed to have some privacy, I closed a door. The biggest fear that was pounded into me was to make sure that I kept my social security number safe. This was easy, I just memorized the number and kept my card in a safety deposit box. I never even thought about someone trying to steal my identity.

The world that my kids have grown up in is very different. We have spent their entire lives telling them to be careful about what they post on the internet because it is there forever, or we would tell them to not post anything that they wouldn’t want their future employer to see. These seem like basic, common sense things to do. Beyond this, we felt pretty safe.

I have a relatively low social media profile. I have a facebook page that I check every 9 to 12 months and I haven’t posted anything in years. I have a Linkedin account, but I only check it about once per year. For this reason, I felt pretty safe and that my privacy was intact. I didn’t think about the fact that I pay all of our bills online and make online purchases on a weekly basis. When my Xfinity account was hacked last month and $350 worth of extra charges were added to my bill, I realized how truly naive I am.

After reading How to protect your privacy and remove data from online services by David Howell, I discovered how much of a digital footprint I actually have. Due to linkability, I have very little privacy. Due to big data, there is a very strong profile of me to be used in various ways. I may never have posted embarrassing pictures or made unfortunate posts, but through my everyday use of the internet I have unwittingly given up my own right to privacy.

I like Howell’s suggestions to erase our digital footprint through unsubscribing to sites, watching privacy settings, and using stealth mode when searching the internet to name a few. I am glad that governments are working to help with privacy, such as the European Union Court of Justice ruling for the “right to be forgotten,” but my fear is that our legislature is not keeping up with the constantly evolving internet world.

Our children are using the internet and social media more than ever and without proper education, they could be setting themselves up for devastating consequences in their future due to their naive choices today. As Dana Boyd explained in The Future of Privacy in Social Media, children do not realize the power that they are giving away without a thought as they post everything about their lives on social media platforms. I think that we need more education for our children around safety, security, and social media. They need to be taught how to keep themselves safe and the importance of respecting their own privacy. Having been in education for 13 years, I have never seen any kind of in-depth instruction surrounding these topics. This may be one way that we can help our children to stay safe.

Privacy issues

I definitely have concerns about safety, however, I think it requires a risk reward analysis

What are your thoughts about the issues of safety, security, and privacy? I definitely have concerns about safety, however, I think it requires a risk reward analysis. The risks include the fact that people are peering into our lives on a regular basis. That is clearly disheartening and concerning and who knows what they know about my family and me. The rewards are equally as extreme. The use of the tools, Google Calendar, shared Google docs that I use professionally and personally (including for grad school) are incredible. The storage of my photos is awesome plus it makes it easy to share my family pictures with my parents who live out of town. Those are just some of the simple ways I use those tools. Bottom line is safe, security and privacy are really important to me, but I also know that giving up privacy allows the use of some pretty amazing tools.

My Concerns on Privacy

As I was growing up, the idea of privacy meant that I would close the door when I want no one to hear what I was saying on the phone. I was able to hear when someone else picked up the extension in another part of the house. The idea of safety and security meant locking your doors and making sure the house was secure from the outside.

The dawn of technology has increased and continues to soar. In my opinion, the focus has been on technology, phone, internet, and wifi speed instead of consequences or issues of human interaction with technology. As I was writing this blog “Sunday Today” had a spot on Unsocial Media how the age of connectivity has led to isolation. Safety is a huge concern for me because as a teacher, I see students withdraw or become depressed due to the interaction they receive on social media. Danah Boyd mentioned in her talk that when the series 13 Reasons Why came out, the crisis center saw a spike in suicide attempts. As a society, we are trying to catch up with the human aspects of technology. We are still trying to understand the negative consequences of being uninhibited with things we say or view. Social media is becoming a platform for users to become anonymous instead of dealing with human interaction.

We do not see the harm by posting our private information. With the ability to have free speech, we are giving those users who have ill intent the opportunity to enter our individual lives and interact with that information.

I received a Snapchat from my son asking why I have this platform. At first, I jokingly said I am missing out on my kids’ life, and I should download this app. Then it dawned on me after hearing Danah Boyd talk regarding teens’ use of social media. I was invading my children’s privacy by connecting to this platform. My youngest used this platform to have conversations with his siblings regarding “private” talks. The underlying concern of me invading his privacy conveyed through his postings. I had to reassure him that I was going to shut down Snapchat after this class.

Being a person who lived through no technology, I am a concern we are moving too quickly and not understanding the human aspect of this new way of life. My social media use is minimum. I would classify myself as a spectator rather than a participant. My use of social media is to view my family and friends post while being a passive observer. The posting of my life on social media is not something that I enjoy doing. Again I am more of an observer rather than a participant.

Internet Privacy or Safety?

About a year ago, I was at my parents house and a commercial came on for Amazon’s Echo. My dad, being very opinionated, went on a verbal rampage about Echo products and how they record everything they listen to. He blamed home smart devices for the decline of everyone’s privacy. He wasn’t happy when I reminded him his cell phone listens to him all the time and that wasn’t any different. Imagine my surprise when several weeks later my dad became a proud owner of several Google Home Minis. It turns out his issue was less about “privacy” and more about “not letting Amazon own his life.” This makes sense when you think of privacy as control of the data you generate and not privacy as being free from being observed or bothered as I was thinking of it.

When it comes to information or data privacy, I am one of the many people who feel resigned to not having any privacy. I know that every time I swipe my card to buy something, the store records my data and my bank records my data. I also know they use my data for marketing and sometimes they sell it. But, I have to buy stuff and I don’t carry cash. I have a smartphone and I know it’s listening to me right now as I talk and type. But I don’t turn voice activated functions off because I don’t think it matters in the big picture. There is no data privacy in today’s world.

When I think about social media privacy, I think about whether or not I am safe online. The answer, unfortunately, is no. I have no idea if the people I have “friended” are actually the people who I think they are. I know too many people who have had their social media identities stolen. Privacy settings on social media are limited. For example, profile pictures are public and it is easy for someone to copy and use your picture to create an account for themselves and pretend to be you.

A few years ago, I was less concerned about internet privacy and ended up the target of an internet stalker who used social media as their stalking platform. They friended me as someone I knew, but had not talked to in a while, and then proceeded to invade my life. A few months ago, my safety concerns reemerged when someone stole my mom’s Facebook identity. One morning at work, my phone beeped and informed me my mom was on messenger so I started chatting with her. It wasn’t until about 5 minutes in when I realized it was 9am and there was no way my mom would be awake. I called my parents house and sure enough, she was asleep. Her privacy settings had gotten “reset” to global after the last upgrade and she had been posting publicly. This allowed someone to match her personality by reading her posts and imitating her.

Since then, I have learned to make my social media accounts as private as possible and I never friend anyone until I talk to them first and verify the account is theirs. Since everything I did to hide my presence used “privacy settings,” I determined that privacy was my issue when really it is safety. Privacy settings can not guarantee our safety online. Privacy settings create isolation which is the opposite of the online communities social media creates.

As I started my MA program, I realized during my second class that social media would be important for my studies. I have been working on finding a way to be open on social media professionally while still retaining the safety of having my personal social media closed. I am sure the balance between safety, privacy and community will not be easy to find, but, I will find it.

High School: teacher privacy vs student privacy

As a High School teacher it can be difficult to address the issues of privacy…

As a High School teacher it can be difficult to address the issues of privacy in a school building. Especially when dealing with your own personal data.

In 2018, a student found my Instagram profile, at the time it was a open to public profile and had pictures of my trips, bad selfies and of my pets. After a student requested to follow me on Instagram I decided to make the profile private. This was for to reasons, the first was because I did not want students to use my posts for creating memes or as a way to hide their own presence. and the second reason was to help dictate who could see my pictures.

Later in that year our school was dealing with several instances with online bulling through an Instagram ‘tea’ (gossip) account. This account used a picture of me as its user profile. They took an image that was my profile pic, added eyebrows and then used it as the profile picture. This created the issue of being tied to a sight that I did not have any control over. We did not know who the account belonged to. This also means that the picture of me they used will forever link me to it.

(top the eyebrow-ed picture, bottom original picture)

In looking through this weeks videos and readings, It is clear that though we create a public to private environment, we have to address the issues of unintended usage of our data especially when others use our data to hide themselves.

Mom! Get out of my (publicly accessible digital) room, and close the door!

When we were kids, my mother gave my sister a diary, so that she could write down her private thoughts. It had a miniature lock and key, so she would know she was the only person with access to it.

I caught my mother reading that diary. More than once. As young as I was, I didn’t know what to do about it. Should I have told my sister? I’d be snitching on my mother. But I did not like the fact that she was violating an explicit privacy policy. It also sent me wondering if and how she might be spying on me.

Was my mother being ethical? She was likely looking for signs her daughter might be struggling in ways she didn’t want to share. Her gift of a “private” diary was definitely deceptive. What about me? Should I have told my sister what I saw? What unspoken compacts would I violate if I kept quiet?

What is the relationship between young people, the online social platforms they use daily, and their parents? Is it okay for parents to snoop on them? It’s not like they need to pick a lock to see what their kids are posting on Instagram or Facebook. Nevertheless young people expect parents to observe boundaries, to refrain from watching their every online move. This ethic, which they believe adults should understand, can easily transfer to the social media companies. Teens are by and large either under-informed or unworried about how their online footprint can haunt them and be used against them.

In 2015, the Thrive Foundation for Youth published an exhaustive report on media use by teens and ‘tweens.’ The report paints a ‘whack-a-mole’ landscape in which parents are only privy to a fraction of the depth and breadth of their kids’ activities. Kids are adept at concealing the full picture of their online presence, while also ironically wishing their parents understood their digital social lives better.

Both groups have plenty to learn. Parents are generally only partially aware of how kids socialize online, and with whom. Furthermore, at a meeting to which adults were not invited, kids have drafted a set if rules they expect mom and dad to understand and follow when it comes to reviewing their online posts.

The trust kids place in their adult guardians to know where the line is drawn is quaint. If they place a similar level of faith in the best intentions of the giant online companies whose terms of service they have signed, they risk a persistent, easily discoverable, indelible digital legacy.

When I taught high-schoolers, I asked them to look into the future, at their 30-year-old selves. I asked if they thought that person was happy with all the choices they were making today. As often as not, they looked at me with an expression that said, “I fail to see the relevance of the question.”

Sharing is caring or is it?

What are your thoughts about the issues of safety, security, and privacy? What are your concerns? What are your ideas for addressing them in ways that still allow you to take advantage of the value of social networking and media?

While driving home alone from a conference in Keystone this summer I called my husband and told him I wasn’t feeing well. I was using Waze to more to monitor the traffic than for directions. I didn’t realize Waze was monitoring me as well. When I hung up with my husband an ad popped up on Waze, an ad for the Urgent Care five minutes from my home, the Urgent Care we always use, I was an hour away. It was then that I realized the lack of privacy I had driving in my own car alone. Was it helpful information? Yes. Did I make an appointment? Yes. It has made me consider things I say in private may not actually be in private.

I have social media, I am not so concerned with privacy that I will delete all my accounts and live without a digital footprint, it doesn’t seem reasonable in this technological age. I do not share my phone number or mother’s maiden name or my social security number, I thought not sharing those things kept me safe.

Everyone must have a personal social level they are comfortable sharing, online and in person. I will spill my guts about a bad day to a coworker who casually asks “how was your day?” I cannot stop myself from saying where I bought something and how much I saved if someone compliments an outfit. Then there are people who don’t overshare, people who would answer “fine, thanks, and you?” to my coworker’s question, people who respond to a compliment with a simple thank you. Our online identities are similar, people either feel free in sharing some personal information, vacation plans, check ins at restaurants, blogs, and YouTube videos, or they have social media accounts but rarely post, or they stay away from social media entirely.

The most important thing is people need to know how their information is being used, it is obviously being used from the targeted ads that appear on Facebook after you google “all inclusive Mexican vacations.” Some people may find that creepy, some may find it helpful. According to Panda mediacenter, “While many users think they are harmlessly adding information to their profiles, this information can be used for targeted ads, sold to marketers, or worse, sold into the black market. Facebook has even admitted to using 98 different data points to target advertisements.” My comfort level, like most people, lands somewhere in between the extremes. I want social media to keep in touch with family and friends, I also want to protect my privacy.

I have created alternate Facebook and InstaGram accounts, one with my professional name that is easy for my students’ families to find and one with my maiden name for personal use. I have had a Gmail address for about 14 years, I have used that email for all things, I am also notoriously bad at deleting email. Since this is near the end of my blog post and I’m sure no one reads anything on the internet, I will confess to having, at this point, over 28,000 unread emails cluttering up the email box. I know, it is a problem. As soon as I post this I will create a new email address and hide the old one, if only I can figure out those privacy settings.

Resources:

(2018, June 26). How Much Does Social Media Know About You – Panda Security. Retrieved from https://www.pandasecurity.com/mediacenter/social-media/how-much-does-social-media-know-about-you/

Searching the Cyberspace Galaxy

As I am writing this post, I have a sense that every word I type is entering, not a black hole, but rather an internet galaxy of trillions of gigabytes (correction, zettabytes) of other words and images. And rather than entering what used to be deemed as a mysterious cyberspace, my words are now searchable, indexable, and can even be claimed and named by another person altogether. Scientists are finding, and naming, thousands of new planets and stars daily; the universe is not nearly so obscure. We are empowered by knowing we can now come to know what we don’t yet know.

But do I want to be discoverable – and discovered? How do I manage this vulnerability, when there is part of me that is drawn to the idea that others might be interested in, even impressed by, the words I have written? To be discovered, or not to be? I now have no choice either way.

So, what are my thoughts about online safety, security, and privacy? It is fading and getting beyond our grasp. I can only hope that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is correct, that “these problems can be solved, and one of the great things about our society is that you can write these predictions out, and people will attack them and they will solve them.”

Maybe this is a non-issue, since these are public words I am writing – at least I am releasing them to be. But there are private words and images, or so I might desire, that are accessible as well, text messages to family members, personal photos posted for friends, locations identified where I have been, or even where I am right now.

I am relieved to have some resources now to start the long journey of ‘cleaning up’ my digital footprint. But, ironically, I am also aware that I need to take steps forward to actually add more footprints. However, my steps will be more cautious now, more intentional, probably rewritten many times over, and certainly not posted in haste.

So, I am choosing to be in an online world. And I want to be an informed mentor to those just now joining me in this galaxy; but even more, to those younger who have been born into this internet culture and who might feel disconnected even within their online connectedness. Danah Boyd shared a profound solution for helping young people who are overwhelmed by this social media world and “who are frustrated with the destabilized network landscape around them.” Both offline and online, young and old, “we must build and support sustained networks of people… [we must] protect people as networks” (Boyd, 2018). In other words, create and uphold real live communities, even if they are built within a virtual neighborhood. This allows for the proverbial “it takes a village” mindset, with people who can be mentors, internet navigators, and social media moderators of sorts. In these communities there can be the safety and security that comes from belonging and the mutual respect that will, hopefully, result in more online kindness.

NPR’s All Things Considered. (2013, Apr 22). Google Execs Talk Privacy, Security in ‘The New Digital Age’. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/04/22/178424347/google-execs-talk-privacy-and-security-in-the-new-digital-age

Boyd, Danah. (2018, Mar 7). What Hath We Wrought?. SXSW EDUCAUSE. [YouTube].