At my high school, it felt like every other week a speaker came to talk to us about the dangers of technology. We heard horror stories of people not getting into college because of their Facebook profiles, of people being sued for sending out suggestive photos of others, and of stalkers pursuing people through information found on the internet. Cyber security is vastly important, and that’s what my partner and I are trying to get across to our middle schoolers tomorrow. Firstly, choosing what you put online is key for maintaining a private life. Secondly, choosing privacy settings greatly affects cyber security.
Tomorrow, Sebastian and I are going in to a middle school math class. We plan to talk specifically about Facebook and its privacy settings. Using math, we will try to get the students to calculate their audiences for different posts. How many people can see your posts to “Friends?” Well, that depends on how many friends are on your friend list. But, how many people can see posts to “Friends of Friends?” My calculations amounted to some 827,000 people. “Public?” That could be any one of 1.15 billion Facebook users.
The thing I love about math is that it puts concrete measurements – numbers – on concepts. When math is applied to something like Facebook audience, it really sets in the reality of who can see my posts! I planned and created this lesson, and I was still affected when I calculated that almost a million people could see my photo albums that are set to “Friends of Friends.”
I am big on privacy, and you honestly just gave me even more reason to be so picky about my privacy settings on Facebook. 827,000 people can view posts if you have your posts accessible to friends of friends? That’s a bit intimidating to me, mostly because I am a private person and I don’t think it is necessary to have everyone involved in your business.
I had never been taught anything about internet security, it’s something that I kind of developed myself, the need to have a sense of privacy in such an online and open world. I think it’s an interesting concept. I feel like I put such views on my younger brother when he started to become engaged in the online culture participation. I warned him about the internet, so I was almost a cyber security teacher. But I definitely encouraged him to be active just to be aware of things because you never know who is who behind a screen.
That reminds me of a trailer for a movie I saw. I never got to see the movie itself even though I’ve always wanted to because the trailer was so interesting. I’m forgetting the name of it, but all I know is that the trailer really did scare me in terms of how you can get yourself into problems in real life by certain things that you do on the internet. The girl started an online relationship with a boy she met online but had never seen in person and he requested that she send him “dirty pictures” which she did but she also went along with his plans to meet up, even though all she had ever seen were simply pictures of him. When she went to the mall to meet up with him, turns out he was a 30 year old man, and she went along with him! She ended up in a pornography industry (boy, do trailers spill things for you or what). It was a really scary trailer – but I think it was scary mostly because it was so realistic.
Your lesson seems to have been very interesting. If I was in that class I would have probably been very engaged in the subject of the class!