Does Privacy Still Exist?

I want to talk about our decisions as individuals to reveal so much of ourselves online on various social media platforms. Between Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, lots of information about us is spread across the web. We choose to share information like our birthdays, where we work, where we live and what we do on a daily basis on social media. We also share images and videos of our everyday life for views and likes. Sure, this might make us feel more connected to our friends but when does sharing our life stop. Almost everything about us is available online for others to access. It leads me to ask the question, does privacy even exist anymore?

There are privacy settings on these sites to limit who has access to images and other information about us, but there is no telling how secure these privacy settings are. Every other day someone’s information is being compromised by hackers. According to the Huffington Post, about 57% of Americans have little or no trust in social media sites. But even with this mistrust, most of us still prefer to have social media profiles because we don’t want to feel left out. The only real way to keep something private is to not post it online at all. I asked my friend Taylor whether she believed privacy still existed. She told me, “privacy is slowly diminishing because social media has made our lives public. Even if we think something we share can only be seen by certain people, there are ways to getting around it.” In an exercise for one of my classes we had to search a classmate online to see what popped up. The individual that looked me up started telling me all this information about myself after 5 minutes of looking me up. She even found pictures of me I didn’t even know existed on Facebook. This scared me because even though she was a self proclaimed “professional stalker,” the fact another student that didn’t know me could find out so much about me was frightening.

So with doubts in our privacy online, why do we continue to make so much of our lives public online? When I asked my friend Alysha this question, she responded, “I believe it’s because of people’s insecurity of being irrelevant. I would have to agree with Alysha.  In society, especially for the millennial generation, there is a constant desire for approval from others. We post pictures and videos of ourselves doing adventurous things and hanging out with friends because we want to project a certain reality to world whether this reality is real or not. It has gotten to the point where I have friends that will do an activity for the sole purpose to post a picture of them doing it on Instagram. Putting our entire lives on the Internet is not a way to live. It can be mentally draining trying to project a certain reality. In fact, according to the Child Mind Institute, increase use in social media by adolescents indicate a trend in lower self-esteem.  This is because adolescents feel pressure to please their followers.  While this is unfortunate, as long as we continue to have approval by others, our privacy no longer seems to matter.