Creeping like Champs

So here’s a riddle for you: what's the biggest oxymoron you can think of?

Give up? How about privacy on the internet.


You may think that you live in your own little world on the internet; that everything you do and say is only seen by your friends and family. I mean, who else would possibly care about what you do or say on Facebook or forums, right?

Jokes on you- a lot of people.

Many people joke about the term Facebook stalking, most of us with an account do it quite frequently, whether between classes, when we should be studying, at night before bed, it’s just something we do. But what we put on Facebook, and what people “creep” about us on there, is scarier than most of us are willing to admit. The Facebook administrators do their best to keep the privacy settings at the highest levels possible to keep all of our information as private as we want it to be, but in reality, you’re still putting information about yourself on the world wide web, and how private can that really be?

I had the perfect example of this arise tonight actually. My roommate is an adamant Facebook user who adds friends she meets at school and work, updates her status daily, posts new pictures from parties and what not, and she makes the mistake everyday she gets on there that what she puts up there is private, just like most all of us do. She was hit in the face by this fact today when she received a call from her boyfriend saying that her pictures had been taken off of her Facebook and posted on a local gossip site called The Dirty. When she went to look at it, she saw that some guy she had met in a class at school had taken four of her pictures and submitted them asking for what the gossip writer thought of her. People commented horribly nasty comments on her pictures that literally brought her to tears. When we looked into what we could do about it, we came up with absolutely nothing. The pictures were technically fair game since she put them up on Facebook by her own free will and what the people were saying about it was just an opinion, not necessarily defamation of character or anything that serious.

It just goes to show you, you never know whose watching what you do on the internet, and you never know just how safe you are with what you put out there about your own private life.