Now more than ever we are at risk on the Internet. Since the Coronavirus outbreak we spend more and more time on social media platforms and websites. For students this puts our information at a more vulnerable risk since our classes now depend exclusively in the web. Here are some things you may not know about how the Internet uses our private information and what we can do to stop it.
Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Google, Facebook and even Snapchat basically own our information once we post something or log in. There’s little to no privacy. When we search for something on the web there are hundreds of companies and people looking at what you are doing so they can advertise their products to you or use your information to their advantage. This makes having privacy on the Internet close to impossible. Every site we go to, every social media platform you use keeps a track of what we do. For example Facebook has tools that allow them to recognize our friends and recommend them to us if we don’t already follow them in a feature called “people you may know” and not only that but by Facebook and Twitter knowing our friends they can see or guess what things interests us. Platform like these not only use our past searches to their advantage they also sell our web navigation patterns to others.
When we download apps, log in or create accounts they asks us to share our contacts, music, gallery and privacy. Once we accept, nothing is ours anymore. Google knows us including what we thought we deleted in a hidden files. So that is why I decided to download into my browser an app called Disconect.me. This app makes privacy a little easier so us. It keeps track and blocks of those sites that want information from me and you. The way it works is that every time you go into a page it lets you know how many other websites are activated there too. Disconnect lets you visualize & block the invisible websites that track you. It’s super easy to download and I recommend it.
Here’s how Disconnect.me has worked for me:
I first used it on YouTube and the number was pretty low, it was mostly blocking google’s different analytics page.
When I used in twitter the number went down but it showed it was blocking a lot of weird sites that I had never heard of.
Yahoo really surprised me though, I barely use it but I wanted to try it there since I heard that it was actually a really unsafe website. As soon as I went the number skyrocketed. It almost reached 100 which is alarming when you think about it. As I keep using the app, the numbers keep going up so that means it working. Once again I recommend you to use it.
To finish I want to remind everyone to use the Internet with caution. It’s a great place to learn but you also must be very careful.
Thanks everyone for reading, hope you guys enjoyed it!
-Lots of Love (A.)
K-Daily 