A few weeks back, I looked through my drawers for leggings to find them all pilled, lint-covered, and just messy. Like any other normal millennial, I went to my favorite store for a few new pairs. Yup, that’s right: good ol’ Amazon. With everything you could ever want with a click, and that Student Prime, who would ever go to a mall to shop? Soooo 2002. I kid. I bought a 3-pack with a 4.5-star rating and starting rocking them just two days later. Keep in mind I did this bit of Amazon shopping on my laptop.

Just a few days ago, as I scrolled through Instagram (via my phone, of course), I came up to another one of its annoying ads. And lo and behold, there were my Amazon leggings, and a few other random items from my wishlists and recent browses were front and center! This has happened to me a few times before, and I rarely thought anything of it other than sometimes reminded myself “Yeah I forgot how cute that mug was, I should totally buy it.” But after everything going down with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, plus the fact that this was one of the rare times my browsing “ traveled” devices (yes I have the Amazon app on my phone and that totally played a role, but it still freaked me out) I decided enough is enough.

We can all admit we are waaaaayy too lazy to read the terms and agreements whenever we join a new site, blinding ticking the “Read and Agree” box. And companies totally bank on that blind faith to gain permission to see how we search the web every day. We really ought to be warier and read terms and agreements (yeah right, I don’t have the hour it takes to get through those. Who does?)

While I’m uncomfortable with the sharing of my information, I know it’s partly my fault for not being responsible enough to read up on what info the site wants from me. But again, we're so blind to how valuable our privacy should be that we leave our locations on our phones just for cool Snapchat filters and geotags.

However, the power here is in the mega-corporations and sites that we join, so some initiative ought to be acted upon by them. There should definitely be a sort of “main points” intro section to these terms and agreements with the general gist so that people can be more aware of what they’re giving to a site by joining. But sadly, as I said before, our laziness is their paycheck, why would they make it obvious to us that they take our browsing history to make ads, or as they like to call it “personalizing” your browsing experience.

I'm mega transparent and have nothing to hide when I browse the internet, but I would really like to be explicitly told my privacy is compromised than having to figure it out through pages and pages of terms and agreements.

Even if stalkers in the typical sense are more reserved for the rich and famous these day, we’re all being stalked by little bots and servers each time we open our phones and laptops. Maybe the day will come where I throw the internet out the window to revert to a hermit in a tin foil hat with a flip phone. But until then, change needs to be seen and internet users need to learn their rights!