SYMPOSI-UM ~ PRIVACY ONLINE

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One of the questions that weren’t touched on in this week’s symposium was ‘have internet users lost a sense of privacy‘?

My immediate reaction was to think back to a guest speaker that came to my high school when I was in year 9. He was a police detective who specialised in tracking down and persecuting child predators online. We all sat in amazement as he told us about his method of catching them. He himself would spend hours a day posing as a teenager or child online with the intention of luring these known child predators into an arranged meeting, where he would then arrest them on the spot.

Learning about the dangers of talking to strangers online was alarming, but something we had heard a thousand times before. What really shocked every one of us sitting in the mezzanine that day was his demonstration on social media’s privacy settings, or lack thereof. He asked someone to volunteer who had a private Facebook account. In less than a few minutes he had ‘hacked’ into her private page and accessed all her information, pictures and location check-ins. What was most scary was the realisation that anyone with enough time on their hands could access this information.

We were all a little shaken up, especially when we heard that he had done the same demonstration with the teachers, where he picked a student at random (which upon reflection doesn’t sound quite ethical). Everyone went home that night and updated their privacy settings. Even now my mum can remember me coming home after school and frantically changing my Facebook password. I might have even deleted my myspace account, who knows.

The thing I find the most funny is that about a week after that guest speaker came, no-one thought twice anymore about what they were posting on the internet. It didn’t affect really affect us more than the change of a password.

I think especially people of my generation and younger who grew up with the internet don’t know any different. I can’t really remember what it was like not having a social media presence and maybe that’s the reason (along with now having a mobile phone) that we have a lack of privacy. We are so used to sharing everything and anything online that maybe we haven’t necessarily lost a sense of privacy, but rather we just don’t ever think about it.

– Caitlin

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