In response to the question posed in symposium six, ‘have internet users lost a sense of privacy?’, my immediate answer is yes, definitely! A quick scroll through Facebook or Twitter makes this pretty clear. You see users sharing every aspect of their day-to-day lives — everything from who they’re dating, how their weight loss is progressing or their current location to what happened to them on the train this morning or what they had for breakfast — and some users have this available for the whole world to see. On top of this, it becomes clear that Facebook has access to a whole range of personal information about users, with personalised ads now appearing in news feeds. Some of the ads I’ve seen include companies selling t-shirts with the name ‘Kelsey’, jumpers that say ‘this girl loves her Bombers’ (the sporting team I follow) and ads for the gym that is around the corner from my house (the gym’s not a chain either). I’ve also seen ads appear on the side of my page for websites I’d just happened to visit recently.
A great example of this lack of privacy came the other day when my boyfriend sent me a photo of an email he’d been sent from Twitter, which listed three follow suggestions. The suggestions were for three of my friends who are all studying the same course as me at uni! Only one of of us lists RMIT on our Twitter account and I’m the only person he follows from RMIT, yet Twitter somehow made this connection.
