Things to Consider Before Posting Online

Over the past decade, internet technology has drastically changed our society, from the way we express ourselves as individuals, to the way we interact and communicate with each other. The genesis and proliferation of myriad social media websites, a number of which are still up and coming, has simultaneously brought us closer together and driven us apart. Facebook and Instagram have become integral parts of our lives. Yet, these social-virtual platforms raise several alarming factors. Primarily, this rule-free zone allows a user to interact with other users, whose true intent and real reaction to your posted content can easily remain undisclosed, while bearing minimal personal responsibility for the outcome of his/her actions.

So the next time you are about to post something, whether it be a picture of your scrumptious dinner or an exciting status update, take an extra thirty seconds to think it through, and give yourself a chance to reconsider before clicking SEND, by stopping to ask yourself a couple of critical questions pertaining to privacy:

Who can see the post? One rule of thumb that I like to follow is this: personal and private information that I wouldn’t share with extended family, colleagues, or even strangers, probably doesn’t belong on the internet. Even the private posts restricted to only ‘friends’ can potentially be accessed by unexpected audiences. Although it may be exhilarating to share a picture of your recently acquired college I.D, the card contains pieces of critical information, such as your address, that most likely shouldn’t be publicly disclosed. Resist the urge.

Knowing that, once something is posted, it can never be permanently deleted, do you still want it out there, in perpetuity?  A snapshot of the nearly entire internet is taken every 6-14 months, using “automated crawlers.” If you find that unbelievable, check out The Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#The_Wayback_Machine). The Internet Archive Wayback Machine began in 1996, right around the time current high school seniors were born. As of December 1, 2014 it contains almost 9 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of ~20 terabytes per week. To put that in perspective, its digital footprint now outsizes the amount of text contained in the Library of Congress. Humbling, isn’t it? Therefore, while you yourself may not be able to access a post that you have deleted, it is important to remember that it never disappears from cached cyber-archives. That’s why halting for a few seconds to think-before-you-tweet will ensure that, in five or ten years, you will not end up regretting that someone else still has access to the post.

At the end of the day, when sharing something online, keep in mind that the internet makes it all too easy for your information to be viewed by others, so take some time to consider the long-term factors before posting. Not thinking about it beforehand could come back and bite you later.