# Privacy Footprint

Do you ever wonder the implications of sharing our lives online? Privacy has been a trending topic lately as some have experience their private information being anonymously shared online. Especially with social media, anyone can find anything about anyone in a matter of seconds, even it those people aren't your "friends" on that platform.

There is a big conspiracy about how Facebook is "secretly listening to our conversations" as the ads that show up on your page can see oddly specific. This is something that I have personally experienced as sometimes I just mention a product and not search for it and suddenly obtained an ad about it. Even though this may seem the case, Wandera conducted an experiment that debunked this myth. This consisted of placing two phones in the same room and played an audio about pet food over the course of three days. Surprisingly, no pet food advertisements showed up on the app.

For this assignment, I first started by googling my name in an incognito window. I was not expecting to find any search results as my social media platforms are private and I do not have a significant following. Unusually, this was not the case. As can be seen in the pictures below my profile picture for my Twitter account was displayed, as well as my LinkedIn page.

### Web Search

I have also become more aware about the information that the browsers that we use retain. I personally use Google Chrome as my main browser and have only recently started to question if only using one browser is the smartest and safest decision. This is because this specific browser knows my browser history, as well as what I specifically search for. Webkay revealed how much my browser really knew about my personal information. This included things from by batter level, to what social media platforms I was currently logged in on. This was eye-opening as it mentioned that I was logged into accounts that I wasn't aware that I was such as Flickr.

### Hardware


Overall, this assignment furthered my worry about how it is more and more difficult to keep information such as your web searches and private social media platforms confidential. I wonder to what extent is this dangerous and if there should be government intervention to prevent this from happening?