IDAT 101: Our online identity crisis: the inescapable truth

Last week's lecture in IDAT101 raised many points about digital identities. How do we protect ourselves in an increasing invasive surveillance society? How do we know about our traces of our identities online? And how do we even escape from it all? One documentary pretty much answers these often-asked questions, and that documentary was Erasing David. Erasing David is about the award-winning movie director David Bond's attempt to escape the eagle eyes of both the government and private companies. He does what is called a Subject Access Request under the Freedom of Information Act to find out more about the amount of data that is being held about him, then a private firm is hired to hunt him down, and he has to escape from them by ditching pretty much every trace of him as possible. This comes to show how almost impossible it is to escape from surveillance of the digital world, and how important it is to ensure that we preserve our online dignities until something is done to legislate against this increasingly-invasive digital world. Failure to preserve our online dignities does have a knock-on effect about our lives, and sometimes even negative repercussions, like for instance, an employer judged a potential applicant based on her Facebook profile (including pictures of partying, implying that the person in question is a party animal), and as a result, she failed to get the job (as far as I know, the profile was even public, and even if it were to be made private, internet spiders would have already cached the pre-private profile). Another case was about a teacher that failed to get into another country as a result of his unusual (but topical to his area of teaching) purchases on Amazon, which I was shocked to hear that even with that, it still has a huge effect on the online identity of that person, but nonetheless, if it was understood (and not misjudged), then maybe Customs and Immigration would have understood about it, and he'd be on his way to the luggage carousel.