The technological progression that affects our day-to-day lives is a double-edged sword. One side of it bestows us with unprecedented convenience, while the other side makes the chinks in our armor ever more apparent. In other words, technologies that simplify our lives do so at the cost of privacy. These "chinks in our armor" can best be described as all the stupid stuff we do that we'd never tell Grandma about. These are the same stupid things that our parents did. I hate to say it, but these are also probably the same stupid things that your grandma did too. Your parents didn't have Facebook profiles when they were our age; heck, they didn't even have digital cameras. Your grandma's "Instagram" is the current logo of our Instagram. The older generations were no better or worse than we are; they just didn’t have the means to document their youthful sense of adventure.
We are the first generation of young adults on Earth to have constantly updated, highly-detailed, electronic autobiographies. Sure we all try to edit the content of our electronic records, but our control is limited when others can jump on our typewriters and publish whatever they want, whenever they want. It would appear as if much of our autobiographical material is crowd-sourced. Records of our parents' proud moments in their young adult lives can be found in a physical photo album. Records of our parents' debauchery never existed. Our generation is different: records of both our proudest moments and sometimes shameful debauchery can be easily found within a few clicks on Facebook.
Digital photographs of all of us will be easily accessible for the rest of our lives as soon as they are shared to any medium connected to the Internet — and now these mediums include Cloud storage.
I know this is nearly impossible to believe coming from the mouth of a 20-year-old guy, but I actually haven't looked at the leaked Jennifer Lawrence nude pictures that took the Internet by storm this weekend. I have abstained from looking up these viral pictures simply because I firmly believe in the right to privacy and couldn't support some malicious hacker who violated several individuals' rights in the most egregious way possible. These celebrities did absolutely nothing wrong. They had no reason to suspect that "iCloud,” a service from one of the most influential software companies in the world, could ever be completely compromised. Yet, their most intimate photographs, undoubtedly intended for the eyes of only specific people, reached all the corners of the world in just one day. Their celebrity status certainly painted targets on their backs, but this kind of privacy breach threatens all of us. The best way to react to this infuriating situation is to really think about the fact that any time you find yourself between the panels of a camera shutter, that moment in time will probably be eternal. So be conscious of the potential future congressman or high-profile CEO in you before you let anyone take any kind of unsavory photograph of you, because it will very likely come back to bite you at the worst time imaginable.
I am not suggesting that we all don tin foil hats and never post anything to the Internet again, or that we carry a morph suit with us at all times so we can be ever ready for anonymous debauchery — though that's not bad advice either, and they also come in a broad array of colors and patterns to suit every individual. At the risk of coming off as condescending, I only suggest that you live your digital lives even more carefully than you live your actual ones. Assume that anything you post on the internet will be easily accessible by all of your future employers — because it will be. I also realize that much of your potential career-compromising content will probably be posted by others and then "tagged" to you. Indeed, there isn't much you can do to remove content others have written and published in your digital autobiography, but we can all hope maybe that every one of us will have enough similar dirty laundry in our digital closet to change perceptions about what is deemed acceptable in the future.
Cloud storage is just one example of the price we pay for convenience. It allows us to upload our private files to a portfolio accessible from any system connected to internet. The days of having to go home to retrieve a file from your home PC have been over for years. Even now, emailing a file to yourself is considered an archaic method to retrieve a file on another system. The labor-saving convenience of Cloud computing is undeniable. However, as an unfortunate group of female celebrities recently discovered, a system in which your data is accessible from any computer means just that: anyone with a computer can potentially invade your privacy. Please don't think that I am against labor-saving software innovations. I am just advocating that we all be conscious of the ever-increasing risks that accompany the ever-increasing connectivity of our lives. All we can really do is to try and make sure content we might regret will never reach the indelible annals of the digital record hall. You never know when Grandma will find your profile and send you a friend request.
