On a typical morning last week, I pulled up CNN on my laptop to check out the news. It was then that I saw it, a story plastered across the web page that does not bode well for the average college student.

The article talked about a recent hack to photos posted on Snapchat.

That’s right, ladies and gentleman. 

The main purpose of the Snapchat app is to allow users to send friends photos and videos that will disappear within one to 10 seconds. Users trusted that their photos would vanish within a set time. 

However, millions of Snapchat users’ photos have been saved to a third party database. To many people’s dismay, the photos they shared could still exist. 

When I read the article, I immediately worried that all of the strange selfies I take and send to my best friends, and the video from the previous Wednesday night my friend snapped of me singing Spice Girls at karaoke night, could be surfacing on some web page.  

However, this leak should do more than just instill fear about pictures from the past; it should be a glaring reminder about the importance of our digital presence.

This past year, the words “anonymous” and “disappear” have seemed to become prevalently used by many new social media apps. In addition to Snapchat, a new app, Yik Yak, allows users to publicly share anonymous messages that supposedly cannot be traced back to the writer. 

Anonymity has made people more bold when posting on social media.

But there are so many problems with this logic.

First off, thinking that there is absolutely no way to trace something you put online back to you is extremely naive. I, too, am sometimes guilty of having a that-won’t-happen-to-me attitude, thinking that I can entirely control who can see my snaps or snap story. 

At least, I hope the world will never see some of the selfies I take. 

But regardless of whether an application claims that it is anonymous, or that an image will disappear after a certain amount of time, there is still a way for it to be traced or found if someone wants it to be.

Everything we do virtually is stored somewhere and could be retrieved by someone. Even if people haven’t figured out how to hack certain databases yet, technology is always advancing, and we never know what could happen in the future.

A few weeks ago in my Business Communication class, we did an activity where we Googled our names in front of the class. At first, this activity did not make me nervous because I thought I had all of my privacy settings under control. However, I was surprised with the results. 

So many images, ranging from old Instagram pictures to photos of my sorority sisters, showed up. Also, every article I have ever written, old gymnastics scores and even scholarship competition results from high school were easy to find.

This was the wake-up call I needed. What if the next time someone searches my name, a Snapchat selfie pops up? 

I would be mortified, and it would probably hurt my professional image.

Students at the University need to be more aware of what they are doing online and via applications. I am not saying that we need to stop using apps like Snapchat and Yik Yak, but I am saying that we need to take just as much care with these apps as we do with other ones on which we know our posts are more permanent, like Facebook or Twitter. 

In this digital age, nothing is temporary. With time, technology is advancing, and there are more ways than ever to find things once they are posted in an app or online. 

We need to be more self-aware of our digital presence and think about how it could affect our reputations.

Rebecca is a senior in LAS. Sh can be reached at [email protected].