Alex from Target, as many have heard, is the recent successful Internet meme-dominating cyberspace.

It all began when a 15-year-old girl named Brooklyn took a secret picture of a cashier at Target, Alex, as he bagged her groceries.

She tweeted the picture, and just a few hours later, found that the picture had become an Internet sensation, and Alex had gone from having 144 followers on Twitter to 250,000 over night.

Basically, because of this picture he became so popular that he appeared on Ellen only days after the meme became a thing.

Imagine someone takes a secret picture of you and posts it online with a caption like, “he/she can bag my groceries any day!” And by some stroke of luck, the picture goes viral without your permission, without your consent, without you even knowing that the picture was taken in the first place.

Okay, now that you’ve imagined it, you’re probably thinking, “that would be amazing. I would love to be Internet famous.” Being internet famous sounds super exciting in theory, until you read the fine print, until you find out that Alex was fired from Target because of the incident, that his girlfriend was receiving death threats online from Alex’s fans, and that Alex was being insanely sexualized by the media and hounded by the press.

He went from being a regular teenager just trying to get through school, to being a victim of the eternal eye of the media. It’s scary. Though Alex has been handling it pretty well, the Internet needs to realize that others who fall victim to this sort of thing might not be so lucky.

In other cases, compromising pictures might be taken of men or women, leading to them becoming a victim of negative harassment only, instead of the praise that Alex has been getting for the most part. He’s getting attention because of his good looks, but in other cases the victims may be getting attention for some less than stellar things.

Being Internet famous is all fun and games until your privacy is invaded and living a normal life is no longer an option for you.