Privacy and identity online

            A week ago, I was shopping for some tools on Amazon and it automatically gave me a million suggestions about other tools that I could buy. Surely, I could have used them, but how did Amazon know? A lot of these websites keep a track of our previous searches and make a virtual image, or profile, of us. As a result, we may have different profiles or personalities according to different websites, just as “Hamlet presented a different self to almost everyone he met" as mentioned in the article ‘Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between’.

     All the random quizzes we take on Facebook (I would be in Gryffindor if I were in Hogwarts, just FYI) and all the endless games that we play create these good-for-nothing apps that keep sucking and selling out our data to these virtual profiles that we create over the years. So, even if our settings are very restricted for others, we unknowingly expose all that information we were trying to hide to the entire world.

      A few years ago when I used to spend literally my entire day on Facebook, I had made all my pictures visible to only my friends. One day, I found this other account with a different name but all of my pictures used as theirs. Someone was impersonating me. I did manage to get that account deleted, but that incident made me think that maybe everything is not as it seems. Maybe we do lose control over things as soon as we put them online, privately or not. 

      To prevent all that from happening, we need to keep cleaning out and deleting those useless apps that we feed by the click of our mouse. We need to keep a check of who all and what all applications or websites have access to everything we don't want them to. Then again, it needs to be done every once in a while. Do we even have that much time to remember cleaning out all this periodically? Do we have the time to protect our own online identity?