(Not So) Personal Information

When I was a kid and the internet first started being, well, the internet, everyone I knew was told never to post your name or address or any personal details online. It wasn’t safe, someone would steal your identity or kidnap you. That started to change around 2010, when I was in high school and Facebook was on its way up to the giant platform it eventually became. When I first signed up, I used a fake last name because that’s what I thought you were supposed to do. My friends all had the same reaction, which was that they thought it was a little weird but understandable. Eventually I just switched my last name to my real last name.

It’s always going to be weird to me how much information we’re expected to post about ourselves online. You can find a person’s name, birthday, school, and friends through Facebook. You can find where they work and have worked on LinkedIn. I’ve never liked LinkedIn, but I’ve been told it’s necessary in order to get a professional job. It hasn’t helped me too much, and I hate having the actual location of where I work just out there for people to see.

Facebook isn’t any better. A lot of people I know don’t really use it much anymore but keep it around for the messaging system. Back in “the day” everyone had heard of Facebook-stalking. It was a regular practice for meeting new people. You’d go to their Facebook profile and learn everything about them you could by checking out their “liked” pages, friends, pictures, status updates, everything. Of course, we knew that a person’s online presence was curated to show what they wanted to the world, but it still felt like sneaking around. It’s kind of terrifying to think about how much people I’ve never actually met could know about me.

It’s not just what we willingly put online. Everything you search or like gets catalogued somewhere. People joke about how you’ll have a conversation about something and then get ads for it later on when you check your phone. “Oh, it’s listening to me,” you’ll say. The phone may or may not be monitoring your verbal conversations, but it does see what you’ve been looking at. Targeted ads track your internet activity, including google searches, videos you watch online, any post you “like.” Any site with a like button automatically reroutes the information that you’ve “liked” something back to Facebook, where the like button originated. That information is also sold to third parties, which use it for advertising. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t a member of Facebook and aren’t on the Facebook website. It is redirected there anyway. So if you “like” something about a book on Twitter or favorite a movie on Letterboxd, it goes back to Facebook and you receive ads based on that information down the line. It’s definitely concerning. The fact that all “like” button information goes back to Facebook is, to my knowledge, not a well-known fact. The amount of information about you out there, whether you put it there yourself or otherwise, is staggering.