We’re being seen, copied, pasted, searched, and evaluated. That are the rules of the internet and social media. Pete Cashmore – the owner of Mashmore and writer for CNN, wrote on one of his CNN column “Privacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun.” Do we have privacy online? We might not give a second thought before tweeting, retweeting, or clicking “like”, but everything and anything you type is on record. We might not check who we friended on Facebook, and many of those accounts have aliases and blurry photos. Do we know them in real life? The truth is, we don’t, and we never check thoroughly. In addition to adding people that are so called “friends of friends”, we now officially share our photos, talking about our personal life to strangers. Who can we blame for this? Social media.

The purpose of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Aim is to share, connect and get updates on family and friends. Apparently, we update our pages because we care about our audiences. However, there are some other things we haven’t accounted for. When we put anything online we don’t know who, and what our audiences will do with the information we provide for them. Posting a copy of your program seemed to be like a great invitation for stalkers and attackers. Giving every post a second thought will prevent this from happening.
Instagram and Tumblr post their most popular articles and pictures on their front page. Which means that non-users can look through those articles and pictures without leaving a trace. Even though nobody on the internet knows you except for your screen name, your photo or article is being liked by numerous people. You might feel proud about being up on the front page, but you are no longer in control of your posts. Your personal comment now becomes a public one.

There are some that are not into sharing their own life as much as others, but are interested to comment on other peoples posts. With direct link to other hashtags on every of your twitter post, your personal opinion can be seen by people all over the world. Some of those opinions eventually become the source of a fight. Your comment about the failure of the new iPhone’s map will soon gain attention and flood your comment box. If you tweet gain enough attention, it will escalate to Tumblr reposts and a screenshot of your entire tweet on various web sites. Because all users are behind computer screens, they’re much more truthful and reckless than they’re in front of people. Rude comments and actions can escalate to cyber bullying.

With Smartphones and touchscreen phones, sharing is just one click away. Your phone automatically uploads your photo online when anything touches it. Even your pet lizard that’s playing Ant Crusher can shoot a picture of itself and share it on Instagram. Recently, Nikon and Eye-Fi (a digital camera SD card that has built in wifi) presented EasyShare functions on their products. You no longer have to insert your SD card into your computer to share your photos from your camera anymore. Technology is moving toward a direction where everything is meant to be shared.

Social media often bring attention to important events, trend about new looks and celebrities, and connect us together through our daily lives. No doubt that social media is a big part of our lives, the 800 million Facebook users showed its popularity. However, it is also what makes protecting our privacy harder and harder. We no longer can share without unwanted audiences, comment without being publicly seen, and type without leaving a trace. Facebook searches show the hometown and other basic information about their users to the public, and other social media encourage their users to input as much personal information as possible. Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook allow their users to pick their own photos to wallpaper their pages. In other words, once you join any one of those sites, you can wallpaper your personal life on it and constantly viewed by different people.

Posting photos and information online is the new way of sharing. Writing and printing photos on paper in comparison seemed to be ancient. However, those are the only ways to keep our privacy intact. That’s the only way to stop Tumblr and Twitter followers from actually following you. We should be a participant in different social media, however we shouldn’t take part in every function. We should enjoy the taste of the wine social media produced, but not becoming an alcoholic because of it.