Question 2: What practical steps have you taken or are you thinking of taking to make sure that you don’t find yourself trapped in a filter bubble or in a situation where you are giving up more personal information on the web than you’d like?

Prior to this class, my general idea of the internet was similar to the general idea of a machine or computer, you give it a command and it executes in a programmed fashion, uniformly for everyone and everywhere the same exact way. Extensively learning in this class how websites, programs, and applications can create personalized profiles of each user, I’m sure it made everyone in the class aware of the dangers of being trapped in a filter bubble. I no longer follow my “mouse like” trends on the internet as I used to. I try to use various search engines, read up on various topics (sometimes outside of my interest area) and gather information from contrasting points of view. Learning of how “our info can travel to places we’ve never been” was definitely one of the most alarming topics. I still hope that our private info is save with the largest tech giants such as Google or Facebook, but as for subscriptions, sign ups, surveys or anything that asks me for a list of private info, I am always thinking twice if its worth the risk. These days the internet is the window used to look up anyones reputation, and it’s very easy to create a bad one either intentionally or by mistake, such as being wrongly tagged as a cancer patient or even a criminal suspect. But as for the goal of protecting our online reputations we must be very careful of what we share, who we share it with and how that infomation is searchable or displayed.