Have you ever Googled your name? Or used Bing or Yahoo! to search for them? (Note I refuse to use Bing and Yahoo! as verbs.)
I have been going over my online presence and it has blossomed in the last few years. From about 36 unique results back in 2010 to over 800 results in 2013. The results are pretty similar in all the search engines. Mainly it brings up my Facebook account, this blog, my Twitter handle, my Google+ account (which I pretty much abandoned on the first day of use) and some other random pages where my name pops up on the first few pages.
But a little digging brings up stuff that is more intrusive. My address, various emails I have had in the past and present, my phone numbers through the years, the value of my house. Things I don’t necessarily want random strangers to know. Services do exist to purge some of these records but some things simply will not erase.
No doubt I have to exercise more care online with regards to what I release to the general public. I already take some steps in this regard. For instance I heavily restrict my Facebook account (my primary social network) to friends only. On secondary service accounts such as Photobucket I use pseudonyms as much as I can and again I use the privacy controls as best as possible.
So why police your online presence? Several types of people benefit from what you put out there. Let’s go from least to most dangerous and just for argument’s sake let’s say I was a neophyte user that loves to fill out online forms, never uses privacy options, and “likes” or “favorites” everything he sees. Let’s call this user neo-bill
Marketers
The internet is such a blessing to people in advertising and marketing. So much chewy and yummy data out there. What can we learn about neo-bill?
Running some cursory checks we can learn his age range, we can learn his height and weight, his ethnicity, his food and drink preferences, what he thinks is a good song, his income bracket, and education level. We can entice him with 10% coupons to fill out forms, free demo songs to try out products. We can draw him in to fill out credit applications for “free items” and learn his phone number, address, his social security number and then learn about his credit score. In short we can build up a complete preferences library of this individual. You can then catalog and tag this specimen and follow him through his life and see how his preferences change.
Human Resource managers
it’s a picnic for these folks too. Everything that is readily available is out there for them to see. In some cases even stuff not readily available. Some HR people are demanding access to your online accounts to see what you like or post. If you want that job, you have to give up your privacy.
Criminals
Well I mentioned credit applications above. Criminals don’t even need to use trickery. Over the last few years there have been major data breaches at well-respected credit card and store card companies that store private information. Thefts have included not only account numbers but personal information of users that would allow thieves to set up secondary accounts. The only real defense against this is the anonymity of the herd. You’re only safe because there are so many of you out there to choose from that the wolves haven’t gotten to you yet.
Aide from this you get the older style con jobs like infecting your computer and then extorting a small amount of money to release your computer. You have the ancient but puzzlingly still effective “Nigerian prince” scams that target older computer users.
Lastly you have worm programs that turn your computer into a zombie being directed by someone else to do their bidding and commit crimes.
The government
When I started out on the net nearly 25 years ago it was an empty an open void. The presence of the government was almost unknown at the time and pretty much everyone had an “anything goes” attitude.
Slowly over time we have sanitized and cleaned up the net and those of us that complained about privacy issues or overregulation were shouted down or ridiculed as paranoids. Then 9/11 hit and all the arguments were shelved in favor of security concerns.
Monitoring of everything you say or post on the net is here to stay. Massive facilities around the world (including the US) now record for all time everything you put in the net. Including those private emails. texts. etc, etc.
For most folks it doesn’t mean much. They see it as the price to pay for fighting terrorists. From my perspective I find it incredible that a few thousand terrorists can force the major governments of the world to hold their own populations hostage just to keep them safe. What is more incredible is that almost nobody cares about the potential abuse of power.
So what can we do? Live off the net? Hardly possible for those of us in the information and service industry. All I can do for now is limit what I release into the public sphere, watch and edit what I do release, make myself as small a target as possible, and hope for the day I can retire and get myself off the digital world. I have to remind myself that I once lived off the net for a good long time. It’s still possible my friends, it’s still possible.
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