Where privacy turns to publicly

The development of the digital age has brought many advancements that make our lives easier every day, but with this great expansion brings a quiet hum of the underlying secrets that we don't know about the internet. We give these websites and apps that have changed our lives like Facebook and Twitter all the information that they could possibly ask for without ever even thinking twice. But what we don't understand or see is how they are using every move we make online against us, in exchange for money and power.

As Juan Enriquez said in his Ted Talk, our presence online is like a tattoo. Every site we click on, comment we make, and product we purchase is documented forever in ones and zeroes, and with the help of the right software and companies funding them, those movements are tracked behind us for the rest of our lives. My mother used to always tell me that the photos and posts and I put on Facebook will never really go away, and boy was she correct. We all know now how deleting things never really wipes them from the internet, but it is more than just that stuff we choose to post. It is the photos we are tagged in, the advertisements that we like, the questions that we google search, and the videos we favorite on our YouTube accounts.

Every little detail can be used to trace our identities and who we are as people. This data is being used to make us more prominent consumers, louder reviewers, and more obsessed with our devices. We think our phones and computers "know us well" but how could they not after years of reading our private emails and texts? By using these devices, we are giving big tech companies everything they need to make us obsessed and keep us exactly where we are right now, in front of our screens instead of spending our time in the real world making memories that will only ever live on in our minds.