So many people turning into narcissists if they weren’t already, or engineered into envy by the “perfect lives” staged on others’ FB pages. Quite aside from the pernicious data mining of Facebook, whose second round of angel investors have tight connections to the CIA & DARPA. And to anyone who scoffs at these connections, the CIA & DARPA would be completely crazy and well-nigh incompetent not to fly at warp speed into funding and nurturing Facebook for the way Facebook fools put all their bidness out in public for anyone and any agency to connect certain dots.
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Yes, in the old days, your neighbors might have known or gossiped about who they suspected was having an affair, whether you just appeared to be poor but had thousands of dollars under the mattress, whether your prolonged absence wasn’t a trip to visit your aunt, but that you were pregnant and had gone to a place for unwed mothers to give birth and adopt the baby out.
But privacy issues these days are different- someone can mine your data and get your credit card info, hack into your Airbnb account and direct all payments to themselves, steal your identity. Women who have moved to get away from a stalker or an abusive partner can be found online, or captured on film by a security camera and found again by the stalker. Innocent teens can be groomed and tricked online by some child molester who portrays themselves as another teen.
In the age of the worldwide web, the privacy issues are quite different than they were historically.
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I don’t dispute that. Different and worse aren’t synonyms. We could go back and forth over this all day long and it doesn’t appear there is much agreement. It would be more fun over a couple of cold ones.
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It always has been—I was with friends and the conversation turned to the Me Too movement then child molesters. Of the group 5 had been molested as children by relatives or neighbors. Some events were worse than others. In the early sixties no one talked about it.
Now we do talk about it and have amber alerts available. At least now it is acknowledged and it isn’t as private.
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My grandaughters showed me something online that is put out as a warning to teenagers. It was chilling. They clicked on this site and there was a video of an old, really creepy looking guy sitting at his computer, typing away. On the screen, the text of what he’s writing appears, with the name of the person who has accessed the site in it (I don’t know how that’s done, that’s also scary) “Hi XX, How’s it going? My name is YY, I’m buddies with some of your classmates, but I live on the other side of town and go to another school. I’m in 8th grade, just like you. They were telling me about how cool and cute you were and I really want to get to know you. Let’s exchange messages and maybe we can meet up sometime.”
Then there follows a warning to the kids never to respond or contact anyone online who they don’t personally know, and if they ever get suspect messages, to tell a trusted adult.
Lots of kids, like my granddaughters, are hip to this sort of thing and would never reply and would tell their parents right away, but there are many kids who would and do fall for such things.