Recent years have been marked with an era of openness resulting to social media (Gaskin, 2013). Individuals are able to increase their networking potential as well as work with other individuals regardless of distance hence presenting them with new venues of conducting business (Duhigg, 2012). However, this phenomenon raises eye-brows whether the digital generation will expect true anonymity from such technology.
Personal information in our social media era is less of private and more of a billboard phenomenon. Companies are able to track your habits in various ways. Companies can profile your habits and associations through tracking the web sites your visits, the articles that you read, and the goods that you buy online (Gaskin, 2013). As a user, you may think you are anonymous when accessing the web. However, a company can link your true identity with your own online profile like in the case of “share to the world” in Facebook or Histogram. The company can transact online advertisements using your true user profile without your knowledge (Duhigg, 2012).
Our persona l computers have tracking cookies that can track where you are navigating the internet (Zesty, 2009). A company can use tracking cookies to spy on your habits. The fundamental task of cookies is to identify a user and prepare a true identity page for the user. In most cases, when you navigate the web, you will be presented with a form to fill your personal details and interests. Such personalized information will be send inform of a cookie file to the web server from your web browser. The server can use such vital information and link you to other custom web pages hence making your secrecy date susceptible for anyone to mine (Zesty, 2009).