Terms of Service

After reading the article, “The Invasion of the cookie monsters” by Jack Shafer I realized how much privacy we give up when we use the internet. Our personal information is constantly being tracked online. Although, what surprised me the most was that we sometimes give up our privacy when we agree to the terms of service of many online sites. Shafer says, “If we were to read the voluminous ‘terms of service’ … We’d see that the providers of ‘free’ services were very candid about how they’d use our personal information” (91). In other words, we give up our privacy when we sign up to use free services such as Gmail or Facebook. In my opinion, the terms of service is a clever way of tricking us into agreeing to give up our privacy without us really wanting to. I say this because if you think about it no one really reads the terms of service. Most people just click yes, and continue on to the next step when they are signing up for an email account, or creating a profile page on a social network site. In the end, reading this article made me realize how much privacy is taken away when we use the internet.

The Giver

The Giver is an interesting story that shows just how much control a government can have over people. In Jonas’s community every aspect of their lives is controlled from the clothes they wear to their emotions. What surprised me the most was that their government also seems to control what they learn. In chapter two when Lily is given her stuffed animal or comfort object Jonas says, “Many of the comfort objects, like Lily‘s, were soft, stuffed imaginary creatures. Jonas’s had been called a bear.”(18)  These two quotes sort of imply that that they don't know what an animal is. I also realized that Jonas has not mentioned anything about pets. Which makes me wonder, why would the government take away this sort of knowledge from them? What’s wrong in knowing about animals?

Fake Identity

In social network sites such as Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook people always try to show who they are, but are people always 100% real? In my opinion, I think people never truly show who they are. In these online social sites we construct an identity for ourselves, but as we construct an identity we post what we think will makes us look good. In an article called “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle she says, “Texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit.”I agree with her because with the help of technology people can always change who they want to be. In other words some people lie about who they are, and in the end we never know who is on the other side of the screen. Like people say, “There’s always more than meets the eye.” This is why I think there is no better way to know someone than in person. When you meet someone face-to-face you truly get to know one another.

 

 

A daisy in the sun

A simple Margarita growing in the world.