After working a little while in security, I developed some sense about privacy, more than what I usually have anyway. I think it is something that can be taken for granted easily until unwanted events start to happen. Privacy is about having zilch intrusion on your private life. If it is your house, take it that you should not have to evade all the Nigerian fraud mail all the time. You shouldn’t have to get dodgy tele-marketing calls every 5 minutes either. Facebook’s system sort of explain it more clearly: if you are my friend, then you will be able to see all the details I wish to display to my friends. Otherwise, you only see my face and name (which is similar to a random person looking at my office security pass with my name on it). That way I can control what private information I can disclose and to whom. Very very good.

Unfortunately things are not usually that smooth. The moment you fill in any forms that asks for your address, phone, of even your email address, you’ve pretty much gave your private details away to strangers. There are always privacy policies here and there, but don’t you always wonder about what would they possibly do to it? Have you even heard about incorrect credit information issues? People get higher rent and pay more for their credit card just because their private information is labelled wrong. The danger is that you can only have one private details, and anyone who have those, can identify you, whenever they want for whatever reason. Once your private info is connected to any wrong doings, it will affect your activities and the issues are mostly money-related.

With the advent of the Net and of course the latest facebook, privacy has gone to a new level. Now other people can automatically know which part of the world you are in, when they are your friends, they will know what kind of person are you. This include your interest, your favorite food, your blogs, your education background, even where you work. Your friends seeing that? Not much problem, they may figure out your lies when you tell a guy/girl that you are single, but your account said that you’re ‘in a relationship’, but other than that, not too much damage. If someone else see that —–> facebook is not very good for social ads. scrape this paragraph

try googling your name, if your name is unique, you will pretty much come up as the top result in google. how much of the information that come up is the one that you want to disclose?

here are the two takes: let whatever is there on the Net defines who you are, or disclose more in order to control it. older one (survey: > 30) will chose the first one, but the younger one will chose the latter.

with open ID, your existance on the web is more defined.

Make your own blog, share your thoughts, there will be time, very soon in the future, where HR will have googling their job candidates as one of the step in their hiring process.