Have internet users lost a sense of privacy?

The other week my friend and I were at a party, in typical girl fashion we had separated ourselves from the rest of the party so we could discuss something that was really bothering us. Both of us are, what is deemed to be, “tumblr famous” a.k.a some misconstrued idea that having several thousand followers makes you “famous” (I totally disagree, I believe in quality not quantity).

Anyway, we were discussing the way we are subject to a lot of criticism on Tumblr, a space where we want to, and used to, feel comfortable discussing   things in our lives that are both good and bad. Both of us are aware, that for some unknown reason, our peers (friends, classmates etc) do what we call “stalk our blog” whereby they don’t follow it, they just read our personal posts, have a critical opinion of what we do with our lives, and often let that form their opinion of us.

With that being said, I don’t believe we have lost our privacy, we have just lost our freedom. “Privacy” implies that there is a rulebook, of what you can and can’t do online. Of course, legalities exist for things like under-age pornography which do create certain rules, but as for a 19 year old girl simply wanting to say on her blog “I had a big weekend and here’s the fun I got up to”, well, that’s internet freedom – that I feel I just don’t have.

A quality my friend possesses is that she mightn’t be aware of is that she is very strong. My response to this situation was “I don’t feel I can post my own opinion because I don’t want people to judge me”, whereas she has a more “I don’t care what people think, they should learn to respect my decisions”. What neither of us can work out is WHY?. Why do people feel the need to invade our personal space? For someone to judge who you are, solely based on one webpage is totally unfair.

A lot of what we face is anonymous criticism, all thanks to the “anonymous” function on Tumblr, where people can say what they like to us, without revealing their identity. These faceless people think that it is O.K to vocalise a strange kind of hatred towards someone they don’t know. So why not turn it off, you may ask? Well, therefore we’d also be blocking out those who want to say nice things to us without revealing their identity.

I feel like the “freedom of speech” totally exists, however I feel on the internet, people abuse this right, and that needs to be stopped.