21 Jul 2016

There are countless different things you can do online and oh boy, we like doing them. You’d have to be an off-the-grid living Bear Grylls type not to use the web for something each day. Using social media is a big one, with more than a quarter of Aussies with an account checking in at least five times a day. At. Least. We also spend a lot of online time surfing, dating, shopping, banking, emailing, commenting, uploading, downloading, sideloading… the amount of things we do online is ridic.

As different and varied as our web activities are though, what they have in common is they involve sharing information about ourselves. A lot of it is info that we give up freely—on platforms like Facebook and Instagram we let others know all sorts of personal details, from intimate things like who we just got it on with, to trivial things like the fact we just ate a pretty sh*t-hot toastie. Some people are more discreet and only communicate landmark happenings like graduations and engagements. But most of us choose to share some kind of personal information online.

And why should giving up a few personal deets phase us? If you want to buy a new jacket online, the shop needs to know what address to send it to right? Of course, there can be drama if we’re too free with our info-sharing—deviants can misuse our Instas, or scammers can tax our $—but most of us know this, and do stuff to prevent it. Only Darwin Award contenders don’t put basic lock-downs on their photos, and most of us wouldn’t open an email from General Skimskam of the Nigerian Liberation Army, whether he’s got newfound millions to share or not.

Still, none of us keep track of where every little detail we might have shared online ends up—how could we? Even the tech-savvy feed personal information into the Internet that can end up anywhere, including places they wouldn’t have expected or wanted it to. Unfortunately, however, anyone can suffer some bad sh*t as a result. Like the top Aussie model whose images and identity were catfished, making her the unwitting face of a scam luring athletes into sending nude photos, or the AFL ‘player’ whose attempted seduction of that top Aussie model (so he thought), involved the romantic sending of doodle snaps…which ended up on a US porno site. Then there’s your average, everyday Pokémon Go players—in the US there have already been multiple reports of such folk being lured into traps by geo-location data-manipulating armed robbers. Or just watch a movie like Disconnect or The Net, if you want to see how cray-cray things can get when technology facilitates someone’s identity being stolen or privacy invaded.

There’s all sorts of other bad or weird stuff that can happen with our data too, from telcos knowing every little step you take, to advertisers knowing every little thing you browse, to your family and future employers wondering why you ‘liked’ a Facebook post made by a profile that turns out to be a hate group or criminal enterprise—you didn’t know who they were, you just thought a random post was funny.

And what if someone ever gathered up all of the information about you that you’ve committed to digital form, from your Insta photos to your browsing history to your bank account balances? They’d know more about you than your Mum, than your mates, than your bae. They’d know things you’ve forgotten, like what you ordered online three years ago, so they’d probably know more about you than you. Is there anyone you’d trust to know everything you’ve done, even stuff you’ve done when you’re angry, or thought you were alone?

It’s all nearly enough to make you stay offline and live out in the scrub eating bull-ants with Gryllsy. But it shouldn’t be—there are plenty of things to help keep your online life drama free. There are government-backed resources offering info and advice on managing your privacy online, like the esafety.gov.au website and Australia Post’s How to manage your social media identity and reputation page. You can make use of the social media privacy settings generally provided in the applications themselves, such as by clicking on that little padlock icon at the top of your screen for Facebook. And maybe set a monthly reminder in your smartphone calendar to check your privacy settings are up to date. You can set automatic security updates on your computer, use a VPN for your browsing, and sign up to the useful ‘Stay Smart Online’ alerts.

In addition to these things, possibly the best thing to do is easy: just drum into yourself that the Internet is a communications tool—you use it to tell and ask things. For everything you do on the net—everything—remember that you’re communicating it. So when you comment on or look at something online, think about whether you’d be embarrassed if your Mum found out, or in trouble if a cop saw it. If so, think about whether you really want to make that comment or look at that page. If you’re posting something about yourself that you wouldn’t go up to a random in the street and tell, make the effort to ensure you’re not communicating it to randoms online. Simple.