New and digital media article 8: Does technology pose a threat to our private life?

Google's Eric Schmidt believes that we need to create new identities to hide from our embarrassing online past. This article states that with the rise of technology we are becoming more open on social networking sites. things that were usually private and only known to those closest to us. e.g. relationship status, party events, what you ate this morning and where you went etc. we now share all this online freely and it may come back to haunt us.


nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.

Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by July in 2010. That's already one in 13 people on Earth.


I believe that due to the rise of technology and social sites we have this idea of gaining things being important e.g. followers, likes, friends etc. as if it's a game which therefore leads to many people stating dull information about their location hoping that someone relates to where they're currently visiting. Or posting a lot more private stuff more publicly and eventually we will look back at what we've said and done online and feel embarrassed by what we've said and done and why we've done it.