This week I took another trip down memory lane. I was cleaning out some boxes at the attic and came across a bunch of old faxes. It drove me right back to when I was about fifteen years old.  Me and my girlfriends used to spend evenings faxing to a group of friends living on the other side of the country. My dad always used to wonder why the fax machine was out of paper, again…

Unfortunately faxpaper isn’t made to last, so the faxes which I so carefully saved, only contained a few unreadable letters and some parts of drawings which didn’t make any sense anymore.

This blok I’m teaching the course digital storytelling.  For this course students have to make an animation with a clear message. The idea for this message they have to get from items out of the news. A few groups of students came to me with articles about privacy on the internet.  The first question I asked these students is: ‘Do you have a hyves or facebook profile?’ The answer to this question off course is ‘yes’. But to the questions how much information they post on the internet and how much people can see when they look them up on the internet, I didn’t get such clear answers.

I had to bring my car to the garage last week for some small repairs. I always go to the same garage, which is around the corner of my house. When I came to get my car back, the guy who helped me said: ‘What a nice picture you have on your hyves profile’.  When I made my profile I didn’t even consider that the guy who repairs my car would end up having a look at my picture.

The first time I used the site ‘wieowie.nl’, it gave me something of a shock. Wieowie.nl is a site which scrapes the internet for information about a person you enter in the search query. Of course I entered my own name. One of the things that the site dug up was my mobile phone number. Apparently somewhere on the internet was a site with my number on it and anyone could get it, just by using wieowie.nl .  Of course I deleted my number, but it definitely made me more conscious about what I post on the internet. 

Another thing is, I can control what I put on the internet, but I cannot control what others put on the internet. Last year I got a playstation 2 for my birthday with the game singstar, which is basically a karaoke game.  A friend of mine secretly filmed me and another friend while we were standing on the couch singing at the top of our longs to the song ‘the show must go on’ from Queen. Of course he posted it on his hyves (because it’s funny), visible for anyone to see. Not so funny, I think..

So now, when I think about my non-intact faxes which I got from my friends years ago and tried to save so carefully, I realize I’m glad we didn’t have the internet then. I’m glad that those meters full of nonsense are somewhat vanished and not wondering around on the internet somewhere, waiting for a moment to come back at me!

tagged with: privacy, social media

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