With current technology speeding up with each passing day, it isn’t surprising that individuals find themselves with dangers of being hacked for important information or personal information. Social media sites are growing exponentially with popularity and it isn’t rare that more than once that I’ve gotten more than my fair share of information about people that I just didn’t want to know about!

Just with a click of a button, people can choose to upload pictures that they may regret on posting later. Or perhaps ranting online from something a loved one did to you. Many personal things appear online, but why? With the rapid speed of being connected all the time, it seems like the norm when others post things about their own lives. We seem to have an obligation to fit in and post things to keep up with the social trend. But is this the correct mindset?

I feel that in recent society today, that too many things are shared with people that we don’t care about. And too many people know things about me that I didn’t really intend to share with them in the first place. In my mind now after regretting posting personal events in my life, I feel privacy equals intimacy.
When I share something that is extremely personal with someone else, I hope that the other person understands that I just gave a token of trust to them. When my friend, Kylie, opened up to me about her mother’s chronic illness, when I hadn’t known her for too long, it really tugged my heartstrings. I felt a real connection, a worthy relationship that was built on the foundation of trust. She didn’t post that on Facebook and very few people could have found it from her happy countenance, and her joyful aura.

If people begin to learn that certain things should be kept private and only shared with the right people, then more meaningful relationships would be built. Instead of having 1000 friends on Facebook that really don’t care about the things that pop up on one’s timeline, one has true friends that really know when to keep the personal things out of the public’s eyes.

Personally, I regret sharing things that are personal to me. When I had two lung collapses and needed to undergo a VATs lung surgery, I posted a long paragraph about how life was fragile on my wall. The next thing I knew was that all 900 of my so called friends began to like and ask how I was. I felt touched and loved, but that soon began to fade away. If they really were my friends, what would a like do? It would have been better to keep things quiet, and find out if my friends would actually visit me at the hospital or catch me up on homework. As of now, I don’t even know if the few friends who did visit me or asked how I was, really cared about me, or saw my Facebook post.

Keeping my privacy has taught me that real connections can be formed if the right people knock on my heart and I let them in.