technoculture314-09

Based on the lectures and tutorials on the issue of privacy on SNS, especially Facebook, I think it is safe to say that that the privacy available does not satisfy the privacy that one wants. The term “electronic foot prints” stood out to me because it does seem like anything one posts on the internet leaves an indelible mark. To confirm the validity of this statement, I googled my name and my username (I only have just one for everything). I was surprised to find that there more search results than I have imagined; everything that contained my username was found from my long-forgotten blog posts (dating back to 2003) to even the comments I had left of my friends’ blog posts.

The reason why the idea of indelible electronic foot prints intrigued me was because it is stirring up a huge commotion in Korea. About a week ago, a famous Korean celebrity “Jae-Bum Kim” from an immensely popular k-pop boy group “2PM” was almost exiled from Korea back to his home in Seattle. The reason for this exile was because his Myspace posts from 2006 that depicted Korea in a bad light were found by Korean Netizens. It is important to note here that Netizens managed to read his posts even though he had medium-high privacy settings on his page. His posts consisted of mere ramblings of a troubled teen who was finding it hard to fit into the Korean culture after having lived so long overseas. Netizens also went further than just reading his posts; they also read the comments he had left on his friends’ sites. Mostly he complained about the culture shock and his voiced desire to go back to the U.S, as one commonly does to friends. This was all long before he became a celebrity, when he was really only a child. However, he was condemned for his comments about Korea because he had become a public figure. This situation illustrates how anything written online has the possibility of causing problems years after publication.

Needless to say, after I found out that all my old blogs/profiles and the comments I had left on other people’s blogs were google-able by anyone who knows my username, I shut down all of my old accounts. Even so, I don’t think my profile has been deleted completely; it has still left an inerasable mark somewhere. It really does seem like the only way to have complete privacy online is to live in a box void of all technology (like the clip Luke showed last week about google’s “Opt out feature”), and really to have never started anything online at all.