Who really owns your computer?

It seems like yesterday that everybody jumped on the bandwagon of creating their own Facebook account. It was simple back then. You had a profile page consisting of your photo, interests, relationship status (that was a big one), and just other little things that told others something they may not have known about you. It was a simple time, seeing posts about one’s day and pictures of your kids playing in the backyard or how much homework you had to do, whatever you posted, it was simple. Back then, Facebook was the go-to platform for posting updates, pictures, statements, and seeing what other people have been up to. Social media has definitely split Facebook apart in the last decade, with other platforms such as Twitter, which boasted a short word count for your posts, to make things even more minimal. This was huge as people started to use Twitter for posting more immediate, short, and quick updates about themselves. Then came Instagram, the platform based off Twitter, where instead of short updates one after the other, you saw people’s photos they posted, one right after the other, in a sort of timeline. This rapid growth of different social media platforms shows how people have developed a shorter attention span, due to the mass information the internet gave us. We didn’t want to see all the information anymore, just what was most entertaining or important to us. This is how online advertisers gained a lot of benefit from their promotions. All of the data that people put on Facebook, into search engines, and the use of cookies, made advertising to a particular consumer, that much easier! There was a Netflix documentary released a year ago called “The Great Hack”. It outlined how businesses used people’s data from third-party sources, to better advertise to certain people. The main plot of the documentary was about an organization called Cambridge Analytica. This company worked with members of the Trump campaign to better advertise to Trump’s demographic, simply based off of the data people put into the internet. This is very frightening to think that a tweet you sent yesterday has already been collected and used to manipulate if need be. It started a conversation about how safe our information is online and if there are laws that protect our data rights. There are laws put in place to protect personal information, such as financial data, private messaging, and most of all, passwords. In the near future, there might be laws stating that people may not automatically collect and store your information for a personal or business-related gain. However, the argument for these laws would simply be that you can currently control what you post online, with the ability to use a VPN or even just control what you search and view online. Regardless of what laws are put in place in the future, the internet is still a very new and open system of communication, so all of us need to proceed with caution.