In an Age of Connectivity, Maintain Your Privacy

In the Internet age, everyone's cavalier about privacy. But now that people are routinely smeared, fired, and jailed for what they share online, should you still be so cavalier?

Right now, everyone's aware of how little privacy everybody else has in the Internet age.

We're all aware of it, but few of us care. Most people are actually pretty cavalier about their privacy.

Most people are on social media. A lot of people want to be big on social media. Pictures of their lives, videos, and so on. They want to blow up and get all those sweet, transitory thumbs up from random people.

Trading privacy for social approval is an attractive prospect when you are younger. I did it; a lot of people do it.

There is an important thing to understand about privacy though, and it is that the stuff you put out there to help you (by making you look cool, giving you a stage to stand on, and the like) can also come back to bite you.

It is important, especially while you're in your more self-focused, self-aggrandizing period of life (typically your teens and early-to-mid-twenties) to do everything with privacy in mind.