Theme 7

When creating a social networking site of your own, or entering personal credit card information to a website I’m buying something from, I always stop to wonder if my identity is truly safe. Can I trust these websites to keep the secrets I hold dear away from prying eyes? At this time, my truthful answer is no. I worry every time I enter some information about myself that it’s going to lead to the downfall of my whole identity, to random charges on my accounts. It’s a stupid fear but one with reasonable evidence to support.
In the article “Vanish” by Evan Ratliff, he tried to completely drop off the face of the earth while challenging his readers to try and find him. His experiment turned out to reveal many secrets of hackers, trackers, and other advanced people. This article was so interesting because of the logic described through every step of the tracking process. Bank account records, twitter pages, facebook, and all articles written were mercilessly sorted through for clues as to where this writer had taken off to. No one knew of his whereabouts or of his current identity. His entire personality was broken down into likes, dislikes and even allergies.
I found that while I was reading this article, I became increasingly paranoid that someone could easily break down all my interests and even sort through my bank account. I realized that because of increased technology, anyone with enough experience and brains can break into just about anything that we put on the web. Strangers across the nation knew about Ratliff’s allergy to anything with gluten.
With the old media, things like identity theft and matters of security was never really an issue. Things like radio and film had no means of theft of identity or other personal information. It was rather difficult to crack into anyone’s account since there was no unified record other than at the bank or through the owner’s receipts and bank statements.
This lack of privacy can loosely be related to Meyrowitz’s theory of “being there” without actually being there. The hacker can be in someone’s life without actually ever knowing the person. With a few simple clicks, anyone can just hack into someone’s personal accounts and view there information. This may be a stretch in saying but this theory somewhat applies. With the use of media, hackers can be in people’s lives without being there. There is really no security or privacy left for us to be sure of. We can no longer have a safe online life.
From personal experience, I was once in a chat room with a few of my friends, playing a careless trick on my close friend of mine. I pretended to be someone completely different to have my friend guess who I was. He managed to pinpoint exactly where I was talking from on my laptop and which part of the country I was in, just by talking to me. It was eerie and disturbing to realize.