One, two, three four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven AND A HALF… days is approximately how long it would take you to count to 1 million, if you counted 1 each second. I learned this from the YouTube channel D!NG, and logically speaking, it may be completely useless fact, but at the same time, it’s kind of cool. That’s why I’ve decided to share it with you today.

As an internet user, I’m definitely more of the nerdy type. I’m constantly reading Wikipedia articles, browsing tech subreddits, and if you happen to look through my Instagram feed, you’ll see a number of videos about how steel gates and engines are made, and along with that, you’ll also see videos of dogs getting slices of cheese thrown on their snouts. But, say, you took a look at my friend John’s feed, you might see a lot of different things - you may see a series of art tutorials, videos of workouts, sports clippings, whatever. John’s evidently got a very different set of interests than I do. Not that I know he’s interested in these things, or that I have a friend named John in the first place.

But really, the Instagram feed is just one way of interpreting of it all - social media isn’t just restricted to entertainment purposes - you have news, sports, media sharing, and all sorts of other uses of it. Everything is interconnected - I can almost guarantee that there’ll be some sort of social media ‘pipeline’ between you and the person next to you right now.

OK, now try putting that scenario into real life. You live in a small house see a lot of people, in houses just like yours, next to you. You’re allowed to walk by these houses and try look into them.

The twist is, while some of the houses don’t let you see through, others are left open - without any gates, or walls, or anything. And there’s a slight danger if the person who lives in that house doesn’t know that it’s completely exposed.

Some people have a much larger presence on the internet than others, and the accurate term for this “house” is called a “Digital Footprint”. Footprints change whenever a user accesses a new website and stores some of their data on it.

According to a survey conducted by Pew Internet, an internet researching company, sixty percent of internet users suggested that they were not concerned by the amount of data they had stored. Another 40 percent of which

People may think that data storing and collecting can only be done if they choose to have their data collected or stored. That isn’t true, because even things as trivial as a Google Search requests can be used like scaled down versions of surveys. By entering a search term, you’re exposing it to your service provider, and they can use this data to assume what you’re interested in at that point in time. This information is usually sold to large, commercial companies to accordingly provide you with advertisements you may be interested in. However, this may be used for other, more malicious purposes, which I’m guessing most of you should already be aware of. Jumping straight to the worst of the worst, you’ve already heard of the Cambridge Analytica incident, where 87 million accounts’ Facebook feeds were filled with content that swayed these people’s political opinions, almost like propaganda. The incident could be a warning to just how the vast interconnectedness of this virtual platform could lead to global… destruction.

Now, I don’t want those videos of metal machinery to be replaced by political debate that affects my opinions, and I suppose you don’t really want that either. So the bottom line of it all is that you’ve got to be careful. Careful as you can.

Thank you.