This week’s readings were very interesting. I was interested in doing some of the steps to help protect privacy that were provided in the links for the last prompt. After going through the lists I decided on using two factor authentication and a password manager. I haven’t set everything up yet because I have a lot of accounts between social media, shopping sites, and having a small jewelry business. I started organizing some of my accounts though and set up two factor on Twitter and put that into a password manager (LastPass).

I started out very wary of the internet growing up. My parents were pretty strict and cared about internet privacy and safety so they limited what sites I could use and wanted to know my logins. This obviously led to classic kid move of me having secret accounts. I will say I’m pretty proud of child me. I was still just as responsible with those accounts (watching personal info, good passwords, safe sites, etc) as the ones my parents made with me. But as I got older and got more freedoms with the internet I did get a bit less strict personally. I still don’t really post too often on things and more so use social media to consume media rather than create my own. Also as the first few readings talk about, yes I am one of many who doesn’t thoroughly read terms/privacy policy. But I usually go into most websites assuming that they’re going to track my info, they can alter/delete things as they like, and they can just completely delete my account if they wanted to. I try to be pretty realistic that pretty much all sites are private companies and they can just do whatever they want with the content. I do try to be conscious of what I post on certain websites and only post content I really care about on websites that I know for sure you completely own and hold all rights to the content you post for the sake of protecting important ideas/content I create.

Random extra thought kind of on topic,

I also do think it’s important to note that to some extent most people can’t really fully control everything they use because of how digital the entire world is. Most jobs, social interactions, educational institutions, etc, require people to be online on various sites/accounts or else you can’t do your job or school work.