Let your fingers do the walking on the interweb

With Facebook opening up their member profile pages to the search engines shortly, it is very possible that these sites will effectively become the phone books of the ‘web. This prospect must certainly get advertising types in a tizzy – what if we can get more ads in FB or MyS? Hopefully the sn sites just allow for the mining of their databases for connections, not individual details to make money and this will actually happen to come to pass – the ‘web will be able to find just about everyone.

This means (and this digital ink has been spilled before) it’s going to be ever more important to be wary of not only what you post about yourself and who you associate with (check out this CBC story). As children can get on these sites and search results are completely open by default, it will become very important for everyone who is using these sites to control their exposure. This includes teachers and instructors. It used to be bad enough that a student could look up ProfX or InstructorY or TeacherZ and call or mail them at will – especially dangerous in smaller communities or where the sense of boundary is different between groups – now people will be able to find out much more.

So what to do about this? I would be sure to limit the number of these social networking sites that I belong to. Join the one that most of your friends are on and start posting only limited information about yourself until you feel comfortable and ask others what happens if you change settings or who can see what you put up. If you are wanting to try a new site, do the same thing and use a throw away contact email (should be the case for just about everything online) and until there are other friends there, don’t reveal too much.

This advice of course works in the ideal world, and this is not and there are so many people who post all manner of things with abandon because everyone else does. And even though there is a chance that your information won’t be used against you, if you are in a position of any public exposure or if you are in a tech related job, take great care and be careful what you are posting.

PS – I do enjoy the irony that this post will be sucked up into Facebook soon.