Status: Desperately trying to stay hidden

Have you ever googled yourself? For some this may be a difficult task if your last name is "Smith" but for others (like me) there is no place to hide on google. The results that pop up are actually all somehow related to me or my social media presence. Initially, you see an image of my LinkedIn profile, an image from my local newspaper about my 8th grade basketball team, and some more pictures related to posts I have interacted with on LinkedIn. Google has also found my Facebook and Instagram profiles although they are private profiles. LinkedIn's whole purpose revolves around public profiles. Connecting and interacting with people in a more professional setting that is tailored towards our professional life means that we want people to be able to find us on this platform. My LinkedIn profile was created as an assignment in college and I have not updated it since. However, my buisness world friends are constantly updating their profile and looking to make "good" connections with successful people in their field. Their reasoning behind this need for connections is that jobs take this into consideration when hiring. Who do they know that maybe I also know? Does this have anything to do with how well they can actually do their job? Absolutely not. It has everything to do with how many times they are willing to click connect with a stranger.
Do you know which apps you have given access to and which apps you have pressed not allow for? I mean if you press not allow, the app keeps asking until eventually you give in and press that allow button. I looked into my location services in the settings on my iphone. I allow 61 apps to see/ track my location when I am using their app. I was shocked! I did not even realize I had 61 apps nor did I know that I was willing allowing them to know where I am. An article I read from the Time this week talked about how it would take 76 hours a year to read all the user agreements we meet. No wonder why either by annoyance or by laziness, I have allowed these apps to infiltrate my privacy. The only solution I have come up with for protecting our privacy is to post less and use our devices less. I don't HAVE TO post at all. I don't HAVE TO use these apps at all. Well besides Maps because I am horrible at directions. The rest are choices I make and these choices are affecting my privacy. Phones were wired for surveillance first. Now, the companys are making it harder for this surveilance to be implemented. Governments want the ability to access and monitor our devices so they can assess potential threats but that comes at the expense of billions of peoples' privacy. In addition, this survelliance or back door into everyone's devices can be accessed by anyone. So who knows who actually may be watching or listening? That's an eerie thought.
I use ChatGPT as a teacher. I often ask it to generate easy, medium, and hard examples of the skill we are working on or have even asked it for sentence starters to print for students to use. It has become an easy tool that I can get a quick answer from. I haven't quite figured out how I feel about students using it because I think students do not know how to use it correctly. Do I think it could be a good resource for students to use to review or get feedback on their papers? Yes! But the temptation is there for students to use it to write their papers entirely. I dove into AI further this week and how it is related to our privacy. I have heard about the debate that AI is trained on bias data but really started to reflect on this idea further. I asked Chatgpt a question that was offensive and they ultimately responded that they would have a "respectful and open conversation" with me about any of these topics. However, I am not a super savy user and do not know what questions to ask AI in order to elicit responses that its makers do not want it to give our to users. If AI is using our personal information for training, there must be bias in the model. Leaks and breaches of our data is common. If a user spent enough time working with AI, they would be able to get personal information from it. They would also be given access to some copyrighted ideas like stylistic choices that an artist may make because AI has seen this data during their training on the internet. The scariest part is that anyone can be a user of AI that holds essentially all of our information and ideas. The wrong person could work with AI for endless hours breaking it down until they get the answer they were looking for which could leave come at the expense of someone else.

Comments

  1. NMZumpanoMarch 27, 2025 at 10:45 AM

    There's a lot to unpack here, Anna. What do you suggest for folks that want to increase their privacy?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tim MillerMarch 30, 2025 at 6:26 AM

    Hi Anna,
    I thought it was interesting how your name is easily googleable, as that could certainly be a violation of privacy in some cases. As someone with an extremely common first and last name (and a minimal social media presence), I never pop up when I google myself. I also don't update my LinkedIn because I think it is strange for me to publicly declare all the places I've worked and where I currently work. That just goes against Internet safety, to me. I thought it was interesting that you use AI in regards to privacy. Personally, I do believe generative AI models like ChatGPT are 100% collecting user data based on prompts, etc. AI can repeat biases of the people that use it, which can perpetuate stereotypes or other harmful language. This doesn't mean AI can't be used responsibly, but we are all still learning how best to use AI (or if we should at all).

    ReplyDelete

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