The internet can be a scary place. But I feel that if you follow the rules and know your rights as a citizen, you shouldn’t be scared or be worried about what you are doing on the Internet. I most certainly am not. My personal motto in life is if you feel a tinge of guilt while doing whatever it is you are doing, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing that thing that you are doing. You can apply that to your Internet usage as well.
A couple of things that do have me worried though are the privacy on the Internet, the fact that there hardly is any, and net neutrality.
Privacy is so hard to come by these days and I feel as if everything is out there for the world to see and take advantage of. I like to Google myself every couple of years to check and make sure that I am doing “okay”–meaning I am still who I am, my information isn’t being blasted all over the internet. In the past it has been totally fine, but recently, it was the worst I had ever seen! I saw the usual, Facebook, Twitter, a link to my family’s winery, but then I saw a website called “Check Info” I clicked and I saw my name, the city I lived in and the cities I lived in, in the past, who I was related to, my high school graduation, and other personal information (I hesitated to type what was on there, here in this blog because its information about me, but then I thought it’s already on the WORLD WIDE WEB, why not?). Don’t worry; I am in the process of removing it all. I couldn’t believe it. I had used this article from USA Today to help clear up some of that information from the Internet. I am a pretty private person, as I have said before, I don’t post much about myself, and to have all of that information on display for anyone to have access to is a scary thought.
Another thing that worries me is net neutrality. Right now we have so much freedom with the Internet. It is a good and a bad thing. It has given us so much knowledge and power to create amazing things but everywhere I go I see people staring into their phones instead of having a conversation with others. I don’t what our freedom of the Internet to be taken away. I don’t want to have to pay for faster Internet service or to only be able to go to certain places. I want to have the freedom to keep doing what I am doing and I believe that we all deserve that right. Who are they to say what speed we can and can’t surf the Internet. We already had to deal with that with dial up and that was THE WORST. The sound of dial up was the worst. I would rather have that back than net neutrality if I am being honest…
