Separating the Public from the Private

Elm’s (2009) concept of privacy issues sitting on a continuum with the poles being “public” and “private” is a good visualization of how we tend to separate our lives, specifically our social media lives. There are times when I direct message a friend (private), times when I post a picture to my profile (public) and times in between, for instance when I post something and give access to “friends only”. The problem is when I post something that I clearly want to be on one end or the other and it ends up being somewhere on that continuum. An example that always concerns me is uploading my pictures on the cloud. I do this as I have learned that backing up my precious memories on a hard drive does not guarantee they will be backed up. I have been disappointed by my computer many times, losing all of my pictures only to purchase a hard drive and experience the same heart ache when it crashed. So now I keep a hard back up and a cloud backup. I do always worry that my picture folders on the cloud may be hacked into and shared, resulting in my “private” becoming “public”. Dennen also talked about privacy rights in the US and EU. Having been in the EU for the last couple of months, I have had to accept a website’s use of cookies when I access it. Some sites give you a yes or no choice but others just provide a disclaimer that by using the website, you are automatically consenting to it. If you want the banner to go away, you have to click to accept. I do also like that a company has to keep their subscription lists up to date and to consistently check with their customers if they would like to stay on a mailing list (though I know this may have resulted in a lot of organizations losing customers when it was first put into play). I was really intrigued by the idea of “technology transience”. Up until now, I have often written about students needing to make sure to update their privacy settings when using social media tools. However, Dennen (2015) hits the nail on the head when she says that someone may not change their privacy settings to their desired level if they have never used the tool before. It is not until they use the tool or after they experience a security violation that they know what changes to make. I also appreciated the discussion on the BYOD. This is something I struggle with in the classroom and have had a mishap with in the workplace. In the classroom, it’s always a struggle of wanting to make sure my students aren’t distracted versus wanting them to use their laptops to further engage with the material. Also, by using their personal devices for school activities, they may not be experiencing context collapse per say, but there is a mixing of their two different “worlds” taking place. There is also more potential for their private to become public. For example, if student has multiple windows open, let’s say their iMessage chat with a friend, and has a class discussion board page open, they may accidentally respond to a classmate with a message intended for their friend. This happened to a colleague of mine that was using her work phone as her personal and private device. She accidentally sent a photo from her weekend to her boss instead of her friend, not paying attention to who she was responding to. Lucky for her, it was not anything inappropriate. The mixing of school and work with private accounts and on private devices further blurs the continuum and also increases the chances of something on one pole shifting to the other pole with just one click.