The internet is insecure. That is the title. But before talking about that I also want to share how I think about writing, whether it is fiction, poetry, a blog post, or anything else.

It is a very temporary feeling that defines how the writing feels, how it looks, and how much care we give it. The sense we were in when we wrote it is part of the weight we give the piece.

Well, I say this because poems, ideas, fiction, images, stuff like that come at random times. And if I didn’t write them then, I mostly will not be able to write that thing as well as I would have written it at that point. This may not affect every field equally. Someone might argue knowledge is not dependent on the moment we first thought it. But the way we write the idea, the art, is how we measure the writing. And that really matters: whether we are writing from the imagined idea, or just because we have to write.

Coming back to the title: yes, the internet is so insecure, no matter how secure the developers say or think it is.

Most of the time people try to track down a photograph or some old post years after they already uploaded it somewhere. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, somewhere. Maybe they are trying to erase a photo of their child, or something they now think they should not have uploaded, and they want to protect their privacy.

But that is impossible. We may take down some of them, especially if we still have account access, or we email support. Even if that works, most probably the internet has them somewhere. Who knows, someone else might have downloaded them, or they are sitting in an archive. We may try to minimize how many are left. We cannot remove them all.

In recent times it is even worse. If we upload something on any of these platforms, especially if it is a little sensitive, in a matter of seconds it will not be only on our own account. It can be shared, recorded, downloaded. So now we have many places to remove, which is nearly impossible, because the content also spreads beyond the platform we originally posted on.

From a security perspective the most secure thing is not to share. If we are really serious about protecting our content, we should not share it. And if we do share it, we should know we will be okay if anyone on the internet can access it. That includes people who send a sensitive photo on chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and so on. It does not matter that we shared it with our loved ones. That means it could still end up with anyone else.

So people do this. They share content in a one-to-one chat and they use self-destructing photos. I mean, what is the point? If we send them, why do we use the self-destructing photo or video? They can be recorded. What the self-destructing stuff does is one thing: it slows down the breach, or more closely, it complicates the recording. Still, we can use an external device, capture, record, and save it.

So that is all.