Facebook is known to archive and sell data on its users. It has been claimed that from data collection through sites such as Facebook the average American has around 5,000 data points on themselves. When seeing this I decided to look up my own online footprint which I generally keep small with little social media use and with few sites using my actual name. When I searched myself I was pretty astonished by the amount I could find. This happened through what I was tagged in, who I followed or liked, and some information popping up from places that I still don't know. If someone didn't know me they could find relatively easily my home, date of birth, hobbies, who I associate with, organizations I am involved with, and even my political party. This was all from simple searches relating to me showing tons of information not even factoring in that their are professionals who research people online and how companies can buy even more information from groups such as Facebook. Which leads to the idea that if the average person such as myself using social media or even just their friends do then how much privacy do they really have? Most revealing pieces of information about me came from my friends accounts who just had me in it so I didn’t even feel that large parts of information I found I even released about myself rather it was friends who are more active on social media just sharing times we had spent together. This really makes me wonder if trying to keep privacy is even possible or worth the effort now in a time when information is so easily displayed about our life’s.
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