technoculture203-09

This week’s lecture about ‘Privacy in the Digital Age,’ along with other readings about new media, has reasserted the belief in me that privacy is, in itself, a ‘catch 22.’ It’s not something we think about very often; we just assume that our computers will block out viruses, prevent hackers from taking our information, and run smoothly. It barely registers in my thought process that every place I go, every link I click, and every email I send is being stored somewhere. And this someplace I can’t get to. Technology has created a false sense of security blanket around us where we pick up our bread crumbs; delete our website histories and emails, which makes us feel like they are gone. But they’re not, and I have a background suspicion that somebody somewhere has access to this information without my suspicion.

Another thing about privacy: I remember a few months back seeing those Facebook applications asking people if they wanted to know who was stalking them:

http://www.facebook.com/tos.php?api_key=aae88392431fd95ab7e63e73dbdcc92a&next=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eaststar.com%2Ffbookapps%2Fstalker%2F%3F_fb_fromhash%3D540ee3139715a747a07c7ecd5396ee1b&v=1.0&canvas

This meant, of course, that people would be able to see whose pages I had been visiting, which is completely terrifying. I’m thinking to myself, “Oh, crap. But have the people I look at I don’t even know how I got to their page in the first place.” After initially being frightened, I realized that this application was fake and, in fact, only showed the past people’s walls I had written on, or something like that. But this doesn’t convince me that there isn’t something out there that is keeping tabs on the people I look at; this keeps me somewhat claustrophobic of technology.