Digital Footprints;A Looming Danger or Advantage?

Recently,i received inboxes from my virtual friends on Facebook inquiring about a message i had supposedly sent to them.Many were as furious,giving rude feedbacks about the unintended message,but none dared tell me what the context of the message was.The thing is,i never at any time inboxed anyone on anything whatsoever,not to the best of my knowledge.Apparently,i am the only one privy to my password,and i have a habit of opening mails on my laptop only,almost all the time.How the hackers got privy of my Facebook account and details of my friends still remains a querry,but to say the least,i am getting concerned by the rate at which this internet technology is making and breaking the world at the same time.

Every internet consumer can bear me witness of having been at one a time  a victim of this hacking business;and it even gets worse when a sexual video of yourself is circulated to all your friends.This is especially dangerous since some of us have our bosses,parents,children, spouses,lecturers etc as our friends.It is a great shame when such unintended information gets to reach the right people with a wrong message.

Now,just how did we pour our interest on the internet and allow people that we do not know invade our privacy?When did the desire of remaining conservative and keeping to private life become old fashioned?
Take a look at Facebook for example;Besides making us reconnect with our childhood friends,old colleagues and sometimes finding love,this social network is currently posing some looming danger.It's young CEOs have over time made us believe that they are a not-for-profit company,and they only make money through advertising.But this is far from being true;take a tour around the net and see just how many sites will allow you to log in with your Facebook ID.How is this just possible,given all internet sites are not owned by Facebook?Could it be that this trusted site is selling it's clients information to other internet sites?What about its most recent photo tagging application that gives one an option to click on friends' faces to tag them?Facebook does this to store the friends' biometric data to use it to identify them in future photos. And talking of the facial detection application,is it not just easy to track people down through the detector?Just how safe are we?

I have heard of companies that are planning to use this face detector on billboards to analyze the emotions of passers by or to study other features such as skin quality.Just imagine you have an acne,you are passing by a billboard at the shopping complex,it detects your acned face and immediately shows you an advert about an acne cream,or when you are somehow feeling down,and an antidepressant pub instantly appears .Is this not just going overboard with market manipulation?

In short,for those of us who have an active digital life,we might just be leaving too many digital footprints behind as well as dragging our friends to all other sites that we visit.How?

Some people have been complaining about social networks that have been rating them on how best  they influence other people eg Klout.Normally a score is given on your profile,and to the shock of many,there exists made up profiles.Take this woman client whose son posted on her Facebook wall 'Mom we will be taking the dog to the vet' and a few minutes later,his Facebook account had been studied and a Klout profile was opened for him ;complete with his full names. To add to that, he was one of those who had voted his mom as his best motivator.But how?The son did not even know of this site and never had he opened an account with them.If Facebook claims to maintain client's confidentiality,then how comes that third parties can be able to track their clients list of friends?

What do i want to say here?We got to be careful about what we are doing on the internet;it does not only affect us,but those close to us too.That reminds me of the shivers i get when i see parents posting photos of their young or new born children on the site;This is not only wrong since it violates the child's right,unless he/she is okay that you post his photos,but also because it exposes your children to a lot of risks.You can continue doing so and someone somewhere is making money with your children,and little do we know what they will be doing in future.



Another good/bad news to those of us who use social sites to seek romance(dating) and to pour emotions,scientists have been studying our online to do research say on law of attraction,propensity to say the truth or lie,or the roles of race,politics etc in potential relationship.These researches have been revealing a lot about people,and which people am i talking about?You and I.Just how did we let all and sundry invade our privacy and use us as guinea pigs?

We cannot crucify social networks/internet era because they have been of positive gain for example in the case of  the Arab Spring.The transfer of information has become easier and the world doesn't exist;we are all living in one global village.There is actually no need for people to move to other countries,you can visit all at the comfort of your home,on your couch with some warm pop corn.The world has been Disneylized;there is nothing left to learn,we have thrown caution to the wind and sworn allegiance to the internet;we no longer go to shop;we no longer go out to seek mates if we need them at all anyway,given online porn sites etc.

How i miss the world,where curiosity played the better part of me.Now i know everything,or i think that i do,yet i do not know anything.We stopped living when the world ended;we are all living in a global village.

RIP dear world,let us continue living in our global village.