Catfish.

I finished Who Owns the Future? yesterday and felt relieved to just finish the assignment. When I was done reading, I thought of all of the insight Lanier has brought to me, with technology and on realizing that the simplest things can make such a big difference. (I may add, that other people who read this book as well may have gotten different, let's say, "lessons" from this than I have). After finishing the assignment, I thought about what was often mentioned in the book and somehow always manage to come to the chapter 'Creepy' (chapter 29; it was probably the thing that most stood out to me). Chapter 29 was where Lanier talks of futuristic technology again, and the creepy effects of its advancement, which included privacy, identity, and security. For some reason this brought the t.v. show Catfish to mind. The main thing Lanier teaches you is that you really don't have any privacy and that you're never truly as "alone" as you think you are.

Something is always keeping track of you; what you're doing, eating, watching, or even browsing. It keeps your information and makes money off of it. Lately, a lot of people who have read Lanier have been making posts about privacy not really being privacy. While I agree to that, and this post counts as one as well, I have to say that Catfish is the t.v.show that gives the best example. For those who may have never seen this, it's two guys, Max and Nev, who help people meet the person they've been dating online. In order to get them to meet, Max and Nev usually go on a popular siren server like Facebook (sometimes even Myspace or on blogs) to get the object's information. They do other things like put pictures from Facebook into Google's search engine  to see what may come up. They even get their emails or phone numbers from the site to contact them. Whenever I watched it before, I never thought of how easily they got the information, but was just fascinated to find out if the person online was who they said they were. It's crazy entertainment.

This got me wondering about how easily someone could do that to me. They could take pictures from my Facebook and enter it into a search engine to find all kinds of information about me (what information that is, I don't know). Even if you delete your social networking site, the siren server will still have all of your information and pictures are infinite. As the famous phrase goes, what goes on the internet stays on the internet. Sometimes people willingly give out a lot of their information without knowing the cost, and is it safe to believe that there'll be no harm? Technology is advancing and people are getting better at using it; how can something that seems so small and insignificant become something that can expose you entirely?