By Imogène Taveau
I’ve always prided myself on the fact that I didn’t have a Facebook account, that the company would never have access to my personal details and my pictures. I didn’t trust them, and I still don’t. In my naivety, however, I had forgotten one crucial point; my father still has Facebook. I can scroll through his account looking at snapshots of my life over the past 8 years, private moments with my friends and family, family friends and relatives no longer with us popping up in old photographs as you go further and further down a literal time line of my life.
It is so easy to find yourself lost in an online database of identities. From a simple “tagging” in a photo, not even necessarily intentionally but sometimes by computer-run facial recognition, you can go from a friend to their friend to their friend’s mother until you end up at the page of someone’s third cousin removed. How is it so easy to pry into someone’s life, to uncover people’s private moments and memories?
We all know about the Facebook scandal, it’s all over the media, but what does this say about the privacy of our information? Who actually has access to our likes and searches and phone number and date of birth? There is no such thing as private information anymore, the term has been exhausted of its use, for in this day and age everything is just a click away.
Pictures of me are splayed across the internet, uploaded by my family, regardless of whether I have given my permission. My name, my identity, is shared in captions and comments and lists, a title to a virtual file of me.
It is more understandable for parents to post pictures of their young children, though as they cannot consent to that it is still not alright, but when did it become acceptable for parents to put their older children’s lives out on display for people to see? When did it become okay for friends and family to put your identity out there for the world to see? When did human beings become zoo exhibitions?
