Do you ever worry about what you posted last night on instagram? What if you were going to post it, but then decided not to, and somebody still knew and saw what you were about to say?

I FaceTimed for the first time last weekend and I noticed something right before I made the call. The background on my iPod was actually me, it was my face just a little blurred so that I could see all my missed calls, and I don’t know why, but that made me a little uneasy. I hadn’t even started the call yet, so generally I feel like that should mean my camera isn’t on yet. But yet there it was, mirroring all my movements.

Back when I was an eighth grade, I had a homeroom teacher that was most passionate about two things, diet Pepsi and his iPad. He was always on it, playing either Clash of Clans or DragonCity, and never let it leave his sight. There was one day that I had to stay after class and talk to him, but I sat in the back of the class so he was able to get on his iPad before I got up to his desk. But that day I think he saw more than he was looking for. He had one of those cases that you unlatch and open to see the screen, and when he flipped it open, he saw a man with about five monitors in front of his face. Once that man realized that my teacher could see him too, he cursed under his breath, hit something on his keyboard, and the screen went blank.

My teacher freaked out and came to school the next day with a nice piece of electrical tape over his back camera. He spent the whole period lecturing to us as to why we should do the same.

There’s another problem I have with iPhones too. You get that little ellipsis every time somebody starts responding to your text. I know it can be torturous to see that little thing pop up when you’re texting somebody important and then see it vanish, but I feel like no matter who it is on the other end, nobody really needs to see if the other person is typing or not.

I would understand if you could actually see the words that they’re typing, and I’m sure Apple will come out with that one day soon, but then I wouldn’t bask in the idea of that either. Now I might be by myself on this one, but I actually like to think about what I say before I send it. I have come close, however, to saying something that I know I would later regret. If somebody could see what I was about to say, that would be horrifying. I wouldn’t be friends with some people I know right now if that were the case.

My last issue is with how much my gmail account knows about me. Now I get it, Google was trying to help us out with location services and google maps and stuff like that. But I can’t help feeling that if Siri knows my address than somebody sitting behind a desk at Google has access to it too. I turned off my location services quite a while ago, but just the other day I was looking up the nearest Round Table and it gave me Carmichael locations based on my recent search history.
I’m not saying that I’m paranoid and I don’t trust the company, if it were that bad I wouldn’t have an account in the first place, I’m only saying that I am and want other people to be aware that our information is out there. If we’ve ever written it down and gave it to a company or business for whatever reason, it’s out there, and our privacy might not be as private as we thought.