Privacy Online

Victor Ruiz
English 96
Privacy Online
Do we have control over privacy online? Internet has become the number one source of media and information in the global margins of social communication. Infact it is the worlds base of data from the beginnings of civilization till now. Have you ever wonder how much personal data you leave behind when surfing the web, signing up for a newsletter or evensending a email? In fact we do have control but not as much, users can manipulate privacy settings, but certain sites require certain information that never goes away, and we do not own any personaldata once its on the cloud.
Online privacy settings are a worthy alternative to keep private things under control, but it is not that simple. Although settings can help to reduce the flow ofinformation from going in and out, certain information is needed for certain sites. For instance, when creating an email account such as “Gmail”, all of those emails are not quite private; the Googlemaintainer employees can easily access your information, not for the wrong purpose, but for cleaning the site, spam etc. You may ask yourself; isn’t that illegal? Well all of that is explained on the “Usersagreement” that you accepted but did not read of course. Privacy settings are useful, but most of the people out there on the web do not take advantage of them, either because they don’t know how touse them, or they simply don’t know that these kinds of tools even exist. Most make use of the Internet simply, for fun or interacting with others, but we have to keep in mind that by doing that, webecome part of the cloud and have access to all of the benefits that this might bring, but also to all of the risk.
Material sent, uploaded pictures, blogs never go away. All of these informationstays on the cloud forever, or until the Internet collapses; which will never happen, not at least for many years. When ever you send a message via Facebook, or upload a picture, even when you...