Private! Friends Only! Wait, how do you know I'm single?

When I was a college freshmen, back when Facebook was still a college-only social media site, I knew people who had no qualms about listing out their addresses, phone numbers and a myriad of other information. Part of this willingness came from the notion that since Facebook was only for your college network, your information was kept private so only those who were your “friends,” would know them.
 
Honestly, I didn’t think much about the possibilities of stalkers and other such characters before “friending” random people I’d meet in my morning class after chatting for five minutes. Sure, people warned me not to give info out in random chatrooms while I grew up in a generation of internet savvy teens, but Facebook was different. Facebook was for college.
 
Then everyone’s grandma, boss and your neighbor’s dog hopped on as well, and suddenly privacy became an issue.
 
What became a nifty site that showed off your mid-riff at a party in order to solidify the grandeur of college social life in a naïve moment suddenly became the photo that you hastily deleted before sending your resume out. Your relationship status, sexual orientation and even family were on display, and the next thing you knew, the advertising banner was advertising a “meet singles” advert after you switched your relationship status to single because of a messy break-up.
 
As it turns out, privacy is not as simple as “friends only” these days.
 
The Wall Street Journal has been running a series on how marketers have been tracking consumers via the internet. Web user’s activities and searches are tracked, collected over time and compiled into lucrative profiles that are sold so that advertisers could place ads that adhere to your interests. There is a reason why the ads you’re seeing appear tailored to what you’ve been browsing online, and that’s because they are.
 
According to a NY Times article written by Miguel Helf, Facebook recently came under fire for some apps that have shared user information with marketers and advertisers. The social media giant has since then vowed fix this problem in light of leaked user  IDs that allow marketers to trace a person’s interests, tastes and even sexual orientation back to a specific person with a name.
 
While it’s one thing to put something out there on the internet, it’s another to have your browsing habits tracked. Advertisers use this for effective advertising, and some might argue that this is no different than putting a tampon advert in a women’s magazine that twenty-something girls pick up. Nevertheless, there is something slightly off-putting about having your habits compiled into a profile so that a company can make money off of your private interests. The fact that the information could be collected in the first place is also a bit invasive, even if it is so that advertisers show you things you might be interested in.
 
While a part of me can’t help but feel like you get what you insert into your browser window, which happens  to be less privacy these days, there’s another part of me that that wonders at the extent of where these strategies will go. The irony out of all of this is that while we want to be able to share who we are with each other, we also want to control it. Companies looking to make money are going to take advantage of this, whether it be pricing for better privacy settings, or looking into what we’ve shared with each other to determine what we like.
 
It wasn’t that long ago when I was signing up to buy space for a website that I was debating whether or not to pay extra money for better privacy so my information couldn’t be read so easily. When did privacy become scarce enough to be a commodity? It obviously happened when the information we’re guarding had a price tag on it.
 
I have to admit that although I don’t mind the advertisements continual reminder that I am single on Facebook, companies dealing with private information need to step up a notch. Google recently came under fire when it was revealed that they had accidently picked up private information ranging from keyword searches to passwords through their cars that drive by neighborhoods in order to keep their mapping system updated. They have publically declared that they are taking actions to better ensure privacy. Of course, this news break would not have been made possible if it wasn’t for an outside source probing into Google’s practices.  While we would like to believe that our information may not be used wrongly, the fact remains that today’s ever growing digital world means that not only more information is accessible, your information is accessible. Nothing is going to happen unless consumers demand it. 
 
While my online profiles are all set under the highest privacy settings, I can't help but wonder whether a part of this scare about private information comes from us having very little control over it these days unless we go off grid and refuse to use the internet. In the mean time, I have updated by Facebook profile status to "in a relationship" so that everyone in my 398 list of "friends" know. Privacy, how we love you, but in this exhibitionist culture, perhaps not nearly enough.