ShmoopTube

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We speak student!

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Media Literacy

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Online Privacy

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a la Shmoop

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All right, talking about online privacy.

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So, Deb, couple of vocab words for you.

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What is metadata?

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So, before we talk about metadata, let's talk about data.

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Data is the photo you post to Instagram.

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Data is your status update on Facebook.

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The metadata is everything about that data.

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So when you say you're getting so meta about something, you're talking about it.

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So the metadata for that Instagram photo

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is the location where you took the picture,

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what time you took the picture, what time you posted the picture,

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where you posted the picture from,

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what computer you were on when you posted it,

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the IP address of that computer.

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All these little things that we think,

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"Oh, hey, I'm just on my iPhone.

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I'm gonna load this up to Instagram."

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It's not just the photo that makes its way onto the Internet.

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It's all of the information about that photo.

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Right, and even Facebook has an automatic

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posting feature, I think most of them do,

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where it'll actually say what city you were in

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when you took the photo

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and where you were when you posted it

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- and what time, and so on. - Yeah.

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So, some of that metadata shows up

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for everyone to see right away.

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So I post something on Facebook and it says,

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"Deb Tennen was in Mountain View, California and posted this."

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You're not expecting that.

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But there's a ton of data that's saved

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that Facebook knows about, Mark Zuckerberg knows about.

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But you can't see -- The public eye can't see.

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Yeah, and whether or not you agree with it,

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whether or not you think it's Big Brother

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or just the government doing its job,

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it's there. It exists.

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And once that metadata exists,

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it doesn't go away.

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So this is another thing.

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We always say the Internet doesn't forget, right?

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[ elephant trumpets ]

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You post something. Even if you delete it,

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take it away, even if that

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image is no longer on the Internet,

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all the information about it is.

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And that image can be found as well.

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So anything you post online, even if you delete it,

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it's still out there somewhere.

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[ groans ] Could be ugly. Okay, so watch your click.

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[ whoop ]

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What is metadata and why is it important?

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[ elephant trumpets ]

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