Remember when you first started using the internet and nobody wanted to reveal their actual identity? Everyone used aliases, because it was weird to share sensitive information - like your full name - on the internet. One of my earliest usernames was bdonn. I used it for everything. I had bdonn@aol.com.

Well, things have certainly changed.

Could you have imagined that we’d get to a world where “over sharing” is viewed as a real - albeit first world - problem and phrases like “I share therefore I am” get thrown around. It’s a pretty dramatic departure from how we used to feel about privacy. And for the younger generation, who grew up entirely with social media, I don’t even think privacy is on the radar.

Some would argue that this is a problem, which is why a group of academics over at Berkeley created a web app called Ready or Not? What it does is allow anyone to enter a Twitter or Instagram username and see a plotted map of where that user has shared from.

Here’s what it spit out for me based on my recent tweets:

The hope is that this will promote awareness around the fact that even one short tweet could be potentially revealing your exact geographic location. But I wonder to what extent people are actually unaware that this is happening or is just that they’re comfortable sharing this information? What do you think?