I started taking this digital literacy class at FIT this semester because I needed to learn how to establish myself online. According to me, to be successful in today's world, an online presence is very important. I used to be socially active on Facebook, but then college happened and I started changing my display picture once in a year and a half with almost no status updates. I would occasionally look up a few people on youtube and watch their videos just for fun, and that was it.
Taking the Online Privacy Test made me realise how much of our information could be out there without us even having a hint about it. But as said in 'Understanding you Online Identity', "Your online identity is not the same as your real-world identity because the characteristics you represent online differ from the characteristics you represent in the physical world." Your online identity that has been built up over the years, might even be the exact opposite of how you really are.
When I took the test, the first thing that I came across was a silly slam book account that I had created in 5th grade and totally forgotten about. There was this other link that couldn't be opened because the domain had expired, but I'm glad it had expired because that link had my phone number in it somehow. There were a couple of my pictures which I had used as my display pictures on Facebook in the past years, which was expected. There were also a bunch of my pins from Pinterest, and a link to my recently set up Linked-in and about.me accounts.
The thing that caught me off guard was when I tried to look myself up on Duckduckgo, and it led me to a page called Yatedo with all of my information in some other language, maybe French. It had my picture, my name, my home and school address, my relationship status, my boyfriend's information, everything. It had basically all the links I had come across while conducting the test all in one place in addition to some new ones. There was something about an Instagram post of a long lost friend that I must have liked recently. It also showed an option for people to be able to contact me. One thing I'm glad about being there was a link to my (supposed to have expired) grade sheets from my last school (I'm shamelessly proud of them).
While the internet makes everything easy for people around the world, it does create a lot of problems too. The fact that all these functions keep going on at the same time amazes me. How one website keeps recording your data by making a pseudo profile, and shows you things according to what you have preferred in the past, or how one website takes out your data from another website and makes a new website altogether out of it is beyond my comprehension. It does make me wonder, though, if it is even safe to do anything online now. What exactly does being cyber safe mean?
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