Information privacy

In the mid- 1990s something happened in the world, ecpesially in the western world. What happened tourned out to affect us in the coming decade more than we could imagine at the time. The name of the phenomenon was THE INTERNET. In the beginning this was strange, and not something that everyone had accsess to. However, that changed quickly. Today most people are on the Internet. They are surfing, chatting, participating on different social medias, writing e-mail, reading news, searching for information - the possibilities are enormous.

Digital dossier

What is the price to pay for this availability? Does people have control over their data privacy? Since before todays youth were born, they started to leave digital footprints to their digital dossier.Well, its not quite right, THEY did not do that, but their parents or other grownups did. Maybe it started with the sonogram, which was distributed to friends and family, and of course put into the digital file. Nowadays it is focus on how children behave on Internet and what they leave of information. I think that it is important to make parents aware of what they leave behind in cyberspace too.

Privacy

I think young people in general have no idea what is collected of them by companies behind the screen of their computers. It is so easy and harmless to post a picture on a web-site, because they are sitting in their own safe room at home and thinking that they posted it so their friends could se it. They may not see ahead, they may not think that what they do today can affect them when they wants to apply for a job. Maybe the picture never should have been posted, maybe the text they wrote was inappropriate.

Teachers and parents need to take responsibility for the youth and children who are participating in the cyberspace. Many of them lives more and more of their lifes online and they have to get to know the consequences of releasing information into Internet.