Protecting One’s Privacy
The protection of someone’s online privacy is just as important as the protection of their offline privacy. It is very important to protect someone’s online privacy because many people out there that are stalkers, hackers and cons go online to find information about their potential victims. We live in a world where everyone is so social media savvy and involved that we don’t pay attention to certain risks that could affect our offline privacy. Many people have their profiles unlocked; therefore they have no control over who views their profile. As a result, some people have access to our most personal information and we don’t even know it. Most social media platforms have a tab that allows us to tag our location. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook allows us to tag our location in our posts and tweets. Even though this doesn’t violate our online privacy because we have the option to say yes or no, this could violate our offline privacy. If some develops an infatuation with a person and begin to stalk them, something as simple as tagging yourself at Starbucks makes their job that much easier to bring harm to you. That’s why it’s very important to protect a person’s offline and online privacy.
Online shopping has become very popular and business has grown due to its popularity. It’s very easy and convenient because you can shop anywhere and off any of your devices. Even though sites say they protect your information, some consumers don’t feel as if their credit card information is protected. There’s really no way of knowing if our credit card information is protected. Therefore it’s very important to protect consumers online privacy to their credit card and personal information when they are shopping online because once someone has that information it is easy to ruin someone’s credit and they may not know until it is too late. Sometimes there’s no way of knowing someone is using your information unless you regularly check your credit report. When you are shopping online and doing job applications, computers have functions that ask you want to save your information and passwords. Once your information is saved anyone that uses that computer has access to your personal information. If you are using a public computer such as in the library and you accidently click yes to save information and password, it’s hard to delete that information. Anyone that logs onto the website has access to your information.
I’ve been on Amazon browsing on a computer on campus and noticed that someone didn’t log out of their account. Most people save their credit card information on their account. If the wrong person got a hold to their credit card information then that could be hazardous.
On an episode of Law and Order: SVU, a stalking victim tagged her location on foursquare and her stalker showed up to the baby store where she was shopping and confronted her. She had to get a restraining order out on him. It’s very important to protect one’s online and offline privacy because both play a huge role in living a comfortable life.













