Internet Privacy

Internet privacy is a really complicated issue, and honestly I'm not sure how I feel about it. I googled myself, and managed to learn rather a lot about me just on the first page of results. Now, I honestly can't say whether this upsets me. I'm offended that the facebook person shown isn't actually me, but I can assume that I would be bothered as well if my facebook page came up when I was googled, as is evidenced by my strict privacy settings on facebook. This signifies to me a weird dichotomy between wanting to be known and wanting to protect my privacy.

In mere moments you can find that I am a member of two campus organizations, that I have a Twitter account, one of my recent classes, and that I got a bursary to attend a computing conference. I feel that I don't have the right to be upset by any of this, but at the same time I worry over how this information can be used to learn far more than I want to be easily available.

To test how far I can get with this I visited the websites of both organizations, as well as my Twitter page. From there you are able to learn about my participation in another conference and are able to make reasonable guesses on a wide variety of people that I most likely know, especially by putting this information together with the general blurb that I place mostly everywhere, stating the University I attend. Because of all this I believe that it would be fairly easy to track me down. "Knowing" some of my friends would probably get me to talk to you, at least up until now when I started worrying about this.

I can be sure that that does bother me, since I went back and generalized all of the above information when my over-active imagination got me thinking about all the damage this could cause.

So what is more important? Where is the happy medium in all this? According to so many resources, but for this quote specifically ArticlesBase:

"Today, many human resource department's search the internet for profiles, photos and other information, good or bad, to learn about and judge prospective new employees. "

So having some information online is potentially very useful, especially in a technological job market. But with an online world of blogs , Twitter, Facebook and all sorts of things that make the Internet fun, having an online presence is a slippery slope of interconnected webs of information, helpfully collected and cross referenced so that you only need to be able to search to learn an awful lot about a person.

I still don't know how I feel about being so easily found online, all I know is that I'm walking away from this blog significantly more paranoid and nervous. I guess 'constant vigilance' is an excellent motto for being online at all, maybe that is too easy to forget now that the Internet is such a pervasive part of our lives.

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