As the internet and the digital world have grown more and more sophisticated, digital privacy has grown increasingly hard to secure.
Ever since August of 2025, encouraged by a video titled, “Change your profile picture to clippy. I’m serious,” by Youtuber Louis Rossman, hundreds of users across platforms have changed their profile pictures to a Microsoft Word assistant from the 90s: Clippy. The main motivating force behind this change was to protest how exploitative companies have become regarding user data and how big a change that is from the early days of the internet. Though Clippy was initially considered a nuisance to his users, the friendly paperclip had never asked for or sold user data to the highest bidder.
With the growth of the internet, the idea of privacy has become a fantasy. Companies and websites can track practically whatever they like: location data, activity across websites and apps, even who a person is close with. What they cannot track is possible to predict via analysis of the data they do have, such as personal preferences for certain products or problems a user might be facing in their life.
The user data gathered by companies, though it has many other uses, is often sold and used by advertiser companies so they can target their advertising better to certain audiences and improve their profits.
This is incredibly intrusive on the side of the companies. Users should not have to worry about their every move on the internet being watched, analyzed, bought and sold; they certainly should not have to worry about personal or location information being passed around between companies. Even if it is not passed around by companies and is instead used for customization, it is entirely possible to create a user-friendly and enjoyable website or app experience without being so intrusive with data collection.
Another problem with data collection by companies is how much choice users have in it. While there is no formal federal US law requiring privacy policies or terms and conditions for websites or apps, many companies have them anyway, so they cannot be held legally liable for any problems a user might have with them that are already outlined in them.
The issue with these policies is that many of them are not at all user friendly. Privacy policies and terms and conditions are usually frustratingly long and written in complicated language meant more for lawyers than the average person. The majority of people just skip through and agree without truly reading them, giving companies power over their data they might not understand.
Asking a user to read and understand a 10-page document every time they create an account for a website or app is unreasonable, and it is borderline malicious to use just a check box after that document as consent with no other warnings on how their data is collected and used.
Companies collect too much information, often in deceptive or misleading ways, and then use them in ways that treat their users like products. Personal information and activity on the internet should not be tracked so closely, and it certainly should not be bought and sold to create profit for the websites and companies that people use. Digital user privacy and respect needs to become a larger priority for companies.
