During the activity of self-check on digital hygiene, it tells me that I need to pay more attention to by own privacy online and my privacy is easy to get violated. In the first step, I searched myself in Chinese, because I thought that’s going to be more information because I was born and raised there. The results are pretty much the same, both engines gave the link of my Linkin information, and another interesting result. That was a description of a boy also named Junxian Wang, which is the offspring of Chinese military soldier, decided to follow the step of his father and Grandfather, to be a soldier in Chinese military. That’s pretty much everything about the name “王珺宪”. I also googled “Junxian Wang”, in DuckDuckGo, there’s a professor in Cranfield University, and lots of pictures of Junxian Wang. I think that raised my awareness of there could be a possibility of leaking my picture online. But in general, I think search engines won’t show too much information because if people want to steal personal information and use it in a bad way, they won’t let people know by googling.
In the second part of self-check, I think that’s pretty depend on my choice. I will use Instagram as my example. I have two personal accounts, the first one to record the interesting thing in my life, and the second one I use to post all my photography. Both accounts are public, anyone can view my account. The reason I decide to do that is because both are not that private. I only have three posts on my main account, there’s no detailed personal information on that account. The photography one must open to public. I think social media is something you need to be open with, or people might not want to get to know you.
In the third part. It’s hard to tell whether I did it well. I tell the apps not to track my activity on other apps, and limited all the background activities, but lots of apps I decided to turn on the location button to activate my location. But interestingly, I thought when people use their phones, they could be located by the signal. But after I rethink about it, I think tracking my location by signal is something government institution would do, but companies do that by activating my location through internet, and that’s completely a different thing, thinking of my information used by companies, there’s a sense of refusion. I don’t want private companies own my information, especially where I’m at, but when it comes to somewhere like uber eats, it’s more convenient to open the location to the app. In general, whether opening the location to the company is something hard to manage, because in most of the time, people are using their private to trade for convenience, that’s something inevitable in information era.
For 5 different websites, I choose StockX, B&H Photo, Amazon, Instagram and X. All of I use the same account and password. I think that’s because I’m not good at memorizing numbers or digits, so I usually don’t want to forget anything because those apps are frequently used. There are two set of account and password I usually use, one of them rated good, other one rated very strong. Because of that, I decided not to use password manager. The reason is simple. I don’t really want an app to keep all my password. There’s a possible threat for private company getting my location, address or personal information, so it’s also a threat for private company carry my password, especially strong ones, I can’t remember them, I already have too many things out of my control, I think I need something in my hands, so maybe start with my password.
In general, I think privacy is something not about legal or not, but about ethical or not. It’s pretty easy to predict that if private companies could use the information of their costumers to pursue larger profit without letting anyone aware of, there always be someplace on the internet that is out of the control of laws. Because companies, or capitals are driven by the interest and profit, so protect the privacy of their users will be an ethical choice and will be praised by the public. But that’s something companies should do, that’s the obligation for those companies to protect their user. That’s why there’s a divide between what we should do and how people actually do. Because ethics don’t exist nowadays, regulator must do their work, try to make regulations against the violation of privacy. But the problems were raised during the making process. How hard should the regulation be? What’s the proper degree of punishment? To fix that problem, I think the prior thing is to apply new detect methods on privacy violation. If information selling or retailing is easy to detect, than regulation will be more efficient and productive.
