Social Network Users Have Ruined Their Privacy

Steve Kerrison writes "'There's little point in worrying about ID cards, RFID tags and spyware when more and more people are throwing away their privacy anyway. And the potential consequences are dire.' I've written an article on the dangers of social networks and how many users seem to forget just how public the information they post can be. This follows a warning sent out by the CS department of Bristol University, advising students that they risk lost job opportunities, getting in trouble with their parents and more, if they don't take care. The warning, however, really applies to all social network users, be they college students or over-zealous blog posters."

Keep in mind

There is a difference between throwing your freedom away, and having it taken away against your own will.

Re:Keep in mind

That's true - unless social networking is being set up as a sort of honey trap encouraging people to compromise their futures. Hence, I would not stress this difference as a dichotomy - but rather as two moments of the same phenomenon.

People are giving away their freedom within a now-corporate framework that encourages this kind of activity. Just remember that.

As with fidelity/client cards, purchase-rewards, and fast-tracking at airports, the web 2.0 is training us to surrender our personal lives for the most meager of rewards. This kind of surrender almost seems propaedeutic for a greater, involuntary loss of privacy. But then again, Americans have already lost their freedom to credit reports.

@Generation

To those born in the 1990s, the @ symbol is more familar than the dial tone. Gone is pen and paper, replaced with keyboards and pixels. Friendships are made via mathematical graphs instead of face-to-face contact. Teenagers no longer crave privacy, instead opting to publish their entire life in a blog. Small circles of friends now strech around the world. Graphical paradise has replaced your own backyard.

Welcome to the @Generation.

There's no there there

News flash: If you say dumb things on the Internet, someone might notice.

How this constitutes a hazard unique to "social networks" is neither explained nor hinted at.

The article presents a non-issue wrapped in snark and hype.

Re:There's no there there

But it's not the "social networking" aspect that does it. The same sort of leakage can occur with a blog, on an ordinary personal page, or via a much-forwarded email message. The article doesn't say anything at all that would indicate a special risk inherent to social networking sites.

Dire, I tell you, dire

While the consequences may be as dire as you claim, this is not certain. Even if true, it may still be rational for people to tell all on the web.

In the mid nineties a friend of mine who was putting a game-theory heavy education to work as a top notch security consultant claimed that we had passed a phase boundary and that privacy was essentially dead. At which point he started "living publicly," doing things like making his daily schedule (in detail) available to the world, sending all his receipts (for everything) to the IRS,etc.

When challenged on this rather odd behavior, and asked what he was trying to prove and to whom, he replied that he wasn't trying to prove anything to anyone except perhaps himself. His thinking was that having no privacy isn't nearly as bad as having no privacy and not coming to terms with that fact. He then walked us through a few cases (such as blackmail) and showed whywhen you were better off not getting in the bind of acting as if you had secrets when in fact others knew them.

Perhaps the MySpace people are at least subconsciously reacting in the same way to the growing threats to our privacy--by getting it all out there, so if anyone tries to use it against them they are effectively immunized.

--MarkusQ

I always tell everyone

When posting something online about yourself consider is it something you'd want your mom, your boss, or a sex offender to know about. Why? Because all three of those will have access to it. If the answer is no in any case, then don't post it. Don't assume that they aren't savvy enough, Google has lowered the barrier so almost anyone can find what they want. Don't rely on technical protections of sites either, especially sites explicitly designed for sharing information.

The web is public, that's just how it goes. Don't put personal information on it that you don't want the public to see, and yes your mom is part of the public.

A bunch of dumb exhibitionists get exposed.

So what? Cry me a river, but how stupid do you have to be to put up embarrassing personal info and pictures damaging to your reputation, and then be surprised when they are used to be embarrassing and damaging?
I had a friend who put up a simple myspace page, and thought it was anonymous, and was shocked when using just the nick and e-mail she had, i was able to trace it through other pages to get her home address and phone number. Took 3 minutes. People don't think. And no amount of legislation or news stories will change that.

old ...

in California you can always find social network, in Soviet Russia socialist find you!!

so?

One of the benefits of having a more open and honest society will be the acceptance of practices most people do but few admit to doing. In this respect, social networks mean social progress.

Re:so?

The generation that went to college in the era of Facebook/Myspace already expects to be able to find drunken ramblings and absurd photos of themselves and their friends online. This generation thinks less of a person who has a web presence that indicates no social life. Who wants to work with a boring person? Once these people are in charge of hiring (another 10-15 years) this won't be seen as a bad thing for many companies.

This is bullshit.

Erosion of privacy is when personal details about your life are taken from you. It's when police chiefs talk about tapping everyones home or looking up library records without a warrant. If I willfully give away information about myself then I never did consider it very private then, did I? This crap about lost opportunities, while perhaps partially true in today's freakishly religious climate, will not be such an issue as these things become more common. This is absolute proof that the minority voice controls the world. Damn near everyone has to lie about who they are because they're afraid everyone else lives some higher "moral" standard and will look down on them. This is simply not true. Even the noisy types who push this false sense of morality on us hardly practice what they preach. As a global community develops and communication with the entire world becomes simple and cheap the world will shift as knowledge becomes free. You will no longer have to worry about losing your job because there is a picture of you with a joint on someones myspace page or your hair is dyed neon blue. The transition period will not be smooth, but I welcome the day. All this article does is beg us to continue living in fear of some invisible and nonexistent moral majority. I, for one, refuse.

It is already happening. The company I work for was founded by two young entrepreneurs that grew up in the age where knowledge was free and they learned that masturbation won't cause hair to grow on your hands or your dick to fall off. They learned that the D.A.R.E. cop that told them the story of the young man who died from ONE hit from a joint was LYING. They realized that nobody else they grew up with believed this horseshit anymore either. They only care about your skill and your work ethic. As the younger generations start to take back this world it will become a better place to live because of the global community and available, simple worldwide communication.

Do not fear it. Embrace it.

Lost job opportunities?

The only thing that the social networks can change is that previously, you could be an idiot and no one noticed until it was too late. Now, it's easy and fun to make your idiocy known to the world.

I once got a job because someone saw me writing somewhat-smart-type comments on Usenet.

If I had a web design company, I'd hire people who can make their MySpace page have interesting content, look good and pass W3C validation... =)

Change Your Name

I used to have a friend whose name was Robert Smith. I felt sorry for him, having such a common name. In today's world, it has its advantages. Anyone trying to dig up dirt on him with Google is going to have a difficult job.

Downhill after first paragraph

The quote from Bristol uni is sensible and even mildly interesting. After that, it's just another tired rant about blogs (some someone who appears to be using forum software to run his own blog, which doesn't help to convince that he "gets" blogs at all) and various other sites he clearly doesn't like.

Obviously it's a dumb idea to post information you don't want published in public. Sites like MySpace have introduced a lot of newbies to social networking, and they'll take a while to get the hang of it, but it doesn't follow that social networking sites are inherently about loss of privacy.

And chat rooms are dead because of sexual predators?! I still see a lot of chat rooms, and surely a lot of that traffic has moved onto virtual worlds. Do we have a story about why Second Life has been shut down because of sexual predators? Thought not. A lot depends on much the site creators think about security, privacy and so on, preferably before going live rather than after the first six crises are reported in the international press. From the little I've seen of MySpace, it looks like a "bolt on safeguards in response to crisis" sort of outfit.

Privacy

Perhaps kids are just more open about their lives these days. It doesn't have to be a case of accidentally releasing information; most people are well aware that the things they post will be accessible to many, and they choose to do it.

Things aren't "private" if they're willingly disclosed. Warning people against providing genuine home addresses, or phone numbers, via the internet is, perhaps, valid advice - however, teenagers regularly disclose mobile numbers to people they barely know in "real life" scenarios, and there's as much chance of something happening in that kind of situation as there is in an electronically-based one.

I believe that these concerns are just left over from an ageing population that doesn't really trust modern technology, or thinks that anything besides face-to-face communication is unnatural. I'm sure people once thought this about telephones, too.

The New York Times

I have created a family blog, and the blog entry page contains the following instructions:

Friendly Reminder: "Would it be ok if this were published on the front page of the New York Times, taken completely out of context, along with your name and address?"

Something to think about before every post.

I see this somewhat differently

The right to privacy is an important one, because it provides us with refuge from totalitarian authority that would seek to enslave us, to use information about us against us. But even more important than the right to privacy is the right to live freely. One might say that the right to privacy is important insofar as it is one of the pillars that support the right to live freely.

How can one live freely if one must hide behind privacy in order to avoid getting in trouble with various authorities? If one can only be a dissident, contrarian, or black sheep if one hides within the safe confines of one's own skull, is that not what we used to call in oldspeak "oppression"?

I see a bolder way, in living openly, freely, and standing up against those who would punish us for exercise freedoms. To use an easy example, if recreational drug users were a unified voting block, they could take over the country in an election cycle. But because the law makes it dangerous to use drugs recreationally, users are forced to protect themselves with a shield of privacy (which has been steadily eroded by the war on drugs over the years). If everyone would just stand up and openly do what they believed in, they would not be politically isolated and would not be able to be pushed around.

Similarly, the gay rights movement really started picking up steam only after people began coming out of the closet in droves. Privacy protected them, but it also contained and enslaved them. By stepping out into the public realm, they have forced society to deal with them, and through the necessary struggles that are still ongoing, have found increasing acceptance in our culture.

It's true that if you are a fool, and do stupid things, and people find out about it, your life will become more difficult. But there is a difference between foolishness and good people standing up in order to live the lives they wish to choose. Let the fools of the world weed themselves out of the breeding population, but let oppressors and would-be oppressors everywhere quake at the thought of a brave world of proud, public freedom-weilding citizens who are unashamed to let the world see their lives in a warts-and-all nakedness, which really is more beautiful than the idealized, airbrushed nakedness once you realize that the latter is a hollow lie, and that truth is the only substance out of which we build our lives.

Where is the shift exactly?

Perhaps they are just redefining the boundaries of "reputation" for themselves.

Facebook is far more secure than MySpace any day

Yes even though it is now technically open to "anyone", the privacy controls on there allow you to lock your profile down to the point so that only those you know or trust can access it even to individual sections (i.e. photos/personal details etc). I feel far more secure using that than MySpace, where its either all or nothing (in fact its like that with all the other social sites that I have used as well).

Privacy

It's one thing to discard privacy in the name of a liberating freedom of expression, but with that you have to accept the fact that people now have the ability to make presumptions about you based on how this information is leaked to them and what information is true. If you make certain of revealing all of your dark secrets -- dirty sexual things, for instance -- then the latter is no longer a problem: they have the story. Now comes the disconnect, however, as a lot of people really aren't as open as you and still cling onto values at odds with what you say and do. Ever try running for office? It's the same effect and it has destroyed politicians over some of the simplest falls from grace to underground things that were never intended to get out.

Here's my question: is it safer to bear all secrets and have none, and risk offending a lot of people and putting yourself in harm's way if one of them takes it personally, or should we just use some basic common sense, be open with a lot of things but hold the things that might get us in trouble as secret as possible? We can never assume how every person will act, so taking at some precautions is always a social necessity. I'm not saying you should hide all of your pornography and put Bibles on the table in fear of someone noticing -- if you can get away with something, then you're fine. It's when people start avoiding you that you should either change, make new friends, or try to change them, aka, when it's a bit too late to remove that factor from the equation.

An example

Not long ago, Skadhi Myers blogged [skatje.com] about anti-homosexuality attitudes in her high school. In doing so she quoted the bigoted facebook comments of jock and student body president Andrew Jallon:

Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley brought up. Honestly why must our country keep discussing this issue. We all know it's wrong and that it just shouldn't be that way. If you want to go with the same sex move somewhere else. Please before we ship yah off. Honestly just get rid of them and then we won't have this issue. Just ship them to Canada. But yah homosexuality is just wrong so just say no and get over it. It's never gonna be right so yah!!

Then someone from ScienceBlogs linked to her post because it was well written and she's the daughter of P.Z. Myers... a fairly well known blogger. So the meme really picks up speed. The next thing you Andrew finds he's coming under attack for quotes he never expected to be disseminated across the continents.

But reading the quote, one wonders who is this Andrew Jallon guy. Well, a quick google and you can see check out his discus and shotput attempts (not very good). PUBLIC real-estate tax records give a strong implication as to where he lives. And finally, Andrew Jallon's bigoted comments end up on Slashdot. Did he expect this? Should he have expected it. Should we all be paranoid about every post...lest someone take it and run?

I fear not the loss of your approval

I've always been blatantly honest with my family and friends. If an employer won't give me a job, his/her loss. I'll find a good one elsewhere because I'm good at what I do.

What a load of horse shit this article is. This is the internet age, nobody gives a shit what random joe #3512351 is doing.

You never had privacy

Never. The only difference between now and The Good Old Days(TM) is the distance that information about you can be obtained from. Where as in TGOD(TM) you actually had to get off your butt and travel to the town a person lived in to have a chat with the local town gossips, now you just need to check google. But it's all the same. Small towns meant everyone knew everyone and all about them. Larger towns and cities gave us anonymity but people don't want that, so large cities breed loud and bold types to stand out so that people see them. The internet and social networking just makes it easier for us to stake our claim in the public square and let people know about us. In the end though, it's all the same, anyone interested can find out anything they want about you, they just have to search for it.

Social Networks != Social Networking

Just to clarify: We are all part of many social networks [wikipedia.org] whether or not we participate in social networking websites.

BIG difference!

On a blog, I can write what I want and give up as much or as little of my personal information and thus my privacy as I want. An RFID tag in my passport is forced onto me, with or without my consent.

The key difference here is whether the person wants to give up his or her privacy. It's their decision. I'm a firm believer in personal freedom, and if someone wants to hold their naked butt into the webcam, together with their phone# and address, it's their decision.

Today, more and more decisions are taken out of our hands to "protect us". I don't want to be protected. I want to be free. Freedom of choice is what makes us human. That's one of the few things I agree with with the bible boys. After all, according to them Adam ate from the tree of knowledge and thus we're forced to choose between good and evil.

I kinda don't want to revert that.

Let them choose. Inform them of the implications, but the choice is theirs.

archiving+republishing questionable

I think we should re-think whether permanent archiving and full republishing of web pages should be permitted at all. Not only does it arguably conflict with copyright law, I think it also has a chilling effect on on-line discussions and free exchange of information.

OTOH why do 'employers' care?

It seems to be that anything that employers want to use to exclude you and depress wages they will do. That's common sense but in a way it's pretty creepy. After social networking, maybe they can say no based on where you live, or if any of your relatives are in jail, or the number of speeding tickets you have or your medical history.

Privacy

Seems like the myspace users are now paying the price of lack of privacy, agreed. Why would anyone want to post all the details about their lives? Myspace becomes a giant warehouse to get information that people can use against you. Imagine, you are interviewing for that job that you want and you loose your chance because your potential employer decides to do a myspace query and doesn't like what they find. It has already been shown that employers have some defacto ability to regulate what their employees do in their off time by threatening them with termination. If you are concerned about privacy, by all means, do not use myspace. Privacy is not such a bad thing and Americans do need to be better at observing the TMI rule (Too Much Information)

Overreaction?

Here's the thing: I'd rather not be hired by somebody prepared to discriminate against me because (for example) I like to get drunk with my friends. Who doesn't? Find me a working stiff who doesn't enjoy a few beers or didn't get up to drunken antics in their teens. They're few and far between. I'm not saying go all-out and tell the world you're a borderline alcoholic, but I'm not going to stop being who I am online because of worries about careers. Society focuses far too much on careers and jobs and I wish it wasn't that way. I'm a good guy, I don't feel embarassed about anything on my Myspace besides the joke "Who I'd Like To Meet" which reads something like "Girls who would consider sleeping with me". Anyone who knows me will know this is tongue-in-cheek and I'm 100% certain that if my current employers had stumbled upon it they would have just laughed and made a joke about it in the office, not refused to hire me. I wouldn't want to work for a company who would.

Just for the record: I don't actually drink, but you know, I might!

Stupid people won't learn.

This little tidbit from the blog of a LEO (sheriff). And yes, his boss knows about it and he doesn't say anything in it that he wouldn't want the whole world to know.


Had a young gentleman put in an application at work last month. Looked sharp! Sounded sharp! Folks everywhere were all sorts of happy.

Unfortunately, the officer doing the background checks put the applicants name into Google and came up with his MySpace account.

Tip for the Wise: if you're going to apply at a Law Enforcement agency, take the paean to the Mighty Marijuana Plant off your MySpace page, along with the albums dedicated to photos of you imbibing the Wonder Weed in various ... interesting ... locations, hmm-'kay?

The gain outweights the risks

Social networking sites increasingly get you friends, appointments/engagements, and jobs. Yes, people who previously didn't might now exclude you based on the public information about you, but so many more people know about you and can connect with you that you may just be better off.

What we're seeing is the tipping point at which the risks of giving up some kinds of privacy are overcome by the undeniable power of the network to create and maintain social circles (and all of the advantages that they confer) by uniting like-thinking folks at a rate never before seen.

The blogodreck problem

Look, when posting blogodreck about something somebody wrote, link to the actual article. This is supposedly about an article written by Prof. Nigel Smart at the University of Bristol. And it doesn't have a link to the article, or any useful reference to it. It doesn't even link to Prof. Smart's home page.

Here's Prof. Smart's home page. [bris.ac.uk]. He's a cryptographer, and one of the people behind elliptic curve cryptography, one of the alternatives to prime-number based systems. But I can't find any reference to risks of social networking on his pages.

So all we really have is some unknown blogger saying the obvious.

how is this news?

I think everyone who reads slashdot is well aware of the loss of privacy associated with social networking sites.

Internet = Stupidity amplifier

I think back to my growing up days and the dumbass things we used to do and say. It's part of growing up- you do stupid things until you figure out how to stop doing them. (Adults get to make more expensive stupid mistakes)

But back then only our friends&family knew about it. I wiped out on my bike really badly once; I went home and Mom took me to the doctor and dentist to patch me up. These days someone would have filmed it and stuck it up on Youtube with a funny audio track. I said stupid things growing up, but only my friends knew about it- they weren't blogged all over creation.

Luckily, it's an intelligence amplifier too- you do something really great and a million people hear about it, not just 4-5. Too bad there's so little of the latter. (Or perhaps it is good- I think I'll go browse FARK for more utter stupidity stories now...)

The Internet is Real

Many of us that read Slashdot are used to the idea that the internet provides anonymity and that we can keep our "real lives" separate and private from what we do online. Perhaps this comes from the fact that the internet, for us, began as minor and very much separate part of our everyday lives. But things have changed. The internet is now pervasive. Today many people, young people especially, do not recognize a separation between the internet and real life because there is no separation.

My point is that people are willing to give up their privacy online because they are used to doing so in "real life." Talking to strangers, telling people your name, letting people see what you look like are all part of being social. Not everyone understands why this should be different online, especially since the opportunities to be social online are often more abundant. Are there dangers from this? Of course there are. Are they different and new (and OMG SCARY!) compared to the dangers of being social offline? Yes, but that doesn't mean they are worse. It just means that people need a different skillset to deal with the dangers.

Privacy is important, but so is being social. Just because something done voluntarily erodes privacy, it isn't necessarily bad.

Its Human Physc

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

I guess it's time...

...to take down my site, http://snarfmyssn.com./ [snarfmyssn.com.] Whodathunk, I can't put sensitive personal information on the web anymore?

This isn't a problem, it's a generation gap

Gee, he's warning kids that if they post on myspace, then the older generation (parents and future employers) might disapprove. Of course, the kids don't care, and why should they? They don't WANT to live in the same culture as their parents. Personally, I find the myspace culture to be preferable to the older culture. With everybody's flaws exposed on the internet, people will learn to be more tolerant of others' shortcomings, and tiny mistakes and personality quirks will no longer seem scandalous. (For example, do you remember the Howard Dean scream? Why should something like that disqualify somebody from the presidency?) The older generation is just a bunch of stuck-up, blissfully ignorant whiners, who are upset that their children aren't conforming to their expectations.

Social networking

This follows a warning sent out by the CS department of Bristol University, advising students that they risk lost job opportunities..."

But, when your boss and supervisor are sharing their deepest (or most shallow) thoughts on Facebook and myspace, it is dificult to be weary of the consequences.

This is silly.

Despite the sort of hyperactive hand-wringing that surrounds issues like Myspace and privacy, there are always a couple of key issues people seem to miss.

First is that, by and large, there really aren't that many incriminating things that people post on Myspace, unless you count the barely-coherent crap they try to pass off as English, but the fact that they're inarticulate goons would have come out on the application, resume, or interview anyway.

The implication always seems to be that a potential employer could find your Myspace, notice that you have pictures of yourself mooning the camera or blogging about how much weed you smoked, and refuse to hire you and so will everyone else and your entire career is ruined before it even got started.

However, how many people really do this? I've been around Myspace a lot and I just don't see much of this going on. The few brain-dead twahns that think it's a great idea to post photos of themselves doing stupid shit are just displaying lousy judgement -- something that would quickly become apparent to any potential employer even without Myspace, so what's the difference?

Consider also the ages involved here. The complainers are usually middle-aged up-and-outs who barely understand what the internet and web are about anyway. The people they complain about are usually teenagers or young twentysomethings who have a solid grasp on the implications of the digital age.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Baby Boomer's opinions are only going to be relevent for a few more years. In five or ten years' time most of them will be retired or out of positions of authority, and people my age (mid-late twenties) are going to be running the show. And people my age, well, we just don't care that you had a silly Myspace when you were a teenager, because everyone else did too, including us. If we start picking and choosing our potential underlings based on who had a stupid Myspace page, we're going to have a very dry pool indeed.

In the meantime, before those Boomers get out of the way, it's not like these teenagers are applying for such high-end jobs that anyone actually checks up on them. They fill in an application, interview once -- sometimes on the spot -- and there's a job. Even for entry-level positions in the "real world", which is where they'll be starting, rarely go beyond a cursory examination of an application or resume and a round or two of interviews. Either you're a good fit for the position or you're not.

Yes, I am simplifying the matter a bit, and there are always exceptions here and there to the generalities I am discussing, but this is basically how it is: The only people that care about this and worry about the privacy issues are either:

• Old and rapidly becoming irrelevent.
• Stick-up-the-ass jerks who would honestly care that you had a beer when you were 18. Who the hell wants to work for that kind of lunatic anyway?
• Media twits who can't find anything more important to report.

Interesting conclusion. Here's another.

Let's suppose we all do an about face and take *all* of our personal information and throw it out for everyone to see. Everyone freely gives out their social, everyone freely tells everyone else their financial information and *every* passenger on an airplane insists on opening up their luggage and showing "security" personnel. Every time you drive by a police office you insist on a breathalizer test and registration check. Every time you run into a government official you hand them a pile of paperwork that includes everything about you.

I wonder what would happen if banks couldn't rely on you to keep your account number secret or your ssn as a secret, or your mother's maiden name or anything. If nothing was a secret, you have to ask the question, why gather any of the information at all?

a) would they make laws against sharing personal information except to government officials?
b) would they make better security systems that didn't rely on you having a secret?
c) would they stop coming to your door to ask questions if you insisted on showing them your family photo album every time they did?
d) if everyone swallowed a GPS tracking device would they try to detain anyone any more? Given that their whereabouts could be identified?

I like what xkcd has to say on this subject.

http://xkcd.com/c137.html [xkcd.com]

A prime example

Recently there was a manager of a local shop, he'd been shipped in from another part of the country to open a new store in the town where I work. Or I should say, used to work as I just moved onto another job myself.

On his own private MySpace, he described the town as a "shithole". Somehow (mostly because it's one of those towns where everyone knows everyone else offline and online) this myspace entry got passed around and eventually quoted in the local newspaper. He subsequently received death threats from residents, caused a massive public outcry and got sent back to his hometown to be "dealt with internally" (presumably, lost his job.) Even though these were his own personal opinions on his own personal MySpace, those were the consequences.

It wasn't just him hurt - the general public being as stupid as they always are, they chose to harass other employees from the same shop who had nothing to do with his views and didn't necessarily agree.

One could easily argue that said town *is* a shithole, especially given the retarded way that its residents responded to what was a personal opinion on a social networking site that had nothing to do with the person professionally or his company. But in case anyone traces me back too (extremely trivial, I've given my website) - no, I'm not saying that it is ;)

The lesson? I don't know. I guess it would be - lifestyle choices, getting drunk etc really shouldn't be a major problem. Everyone acts stupidly now and again. But think extremely carefully before you openly slag off other people or places online because without the appropriate care it has a good chance of getting back to them and you will suffer the consequences. By all means call the town you work in a shithole, but for goodness sake do it using a screen name on a site where you can't easily be traced back to yourself as an individual. The more sensitive the comment, the more precautions you should put in place.

For the ultimate protection, never ever under any circumstances say anything that you don't want the entire world to hear and misinterpret. Now, that's practically impossible (I try to keep my personal website as close to that as possible though, and just a couple of weeks ago my interviewer commented on my weblog in the interview itself - I knew this was always likely due to the email address I use. It was positive. I got the job.) It's about weighing up the risks and whether you are prepared for the worst case scenario. If fragments of my previous paragraph got quoted (out of context) in the same paper, I'd be looking at similar problems - however given how late I am in posting a comment to this discussion, how few non-nerds bother to read Slashdot let alone the comments etc, I have made that calculated risk. In that worst case scenario, I'm ready to reply to the newspaper and point them to the full comment and make any necessary clarifications.

The bottom line is that it's all about judgement. You should think about how your comment can be taken by different people, what the consequences would be, what the likelihood of that comment being used against you actually *is* and either don't make the comment in the first place or take a *calculated* risk. Not just go spouting anything and everything on the most public site on the internet. Kids are not so good at making those judgements, but then nobody should be having a go at you later in life for something that you wrote when you were 13 anyway. I'm talking about adults here.

People must grow up

I personally always post under my real name or a screen name which is based on my real name. Unfortunately this does have some security implications. Sometimes we may risk our lives for what we say on our blogs, but I do not think that it is a right thing to censor yourself too much, because, after all, you are and must feel like a free individual with no fear of others discriminating against you (and you shouldn't discriminate, either). People must grow up and be more tolerant toward others.

Nothing new!

It has always been like this: If you stand out, speak up or just ascend the soapbox (physically) someone might actually notice, and this someone might be your future employer, or know your future employer - or similar. Same thing today on the internet. Sure, it is easier to dig up old 'soapbox events', but at the same time there are so many more of them made by everybody else, so it's getting much harder to find the relevant ones. The net result is always about the same - most people will not be 'found out' in any major way.

Having a unique birth name might seem a disadvantage, but all the blogs I've ever been to uses nicknames and thus nothing is revealed anyway. That is unless you yourself disclose something personal (apart from your opinion of course), but then you're just either stupid or don't care. But the same with reader's comments in newspapers that could be said to be the equivivalent before the internet - you've always had the option of remaining anonymous; you just had to ask for it. As long as the newspaper had your name, they usually happily complied.

What is true though is that we need to educate people about giving out too much personal information. Children are getting there though due to the pedophile threat, but adults need to be aware as well. Don't stop participating, just think about what you reveal about yourself, that's it. Actually just: Use common sense... Too bad common sense isn't all that.. common... ;)

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

>> Where are the safegaurds?

With the parents, of course. Adults control the world children live in, right? Once your kids are adults
(and the transition to adulthood starts around age 8, earlier for the smart ones), if you haven't taught
them basic common sense (not common whatsoever IMO), then it's on you. We're supposed to limit
the ability of people to communicate with one another? Communication is, after all, what you make of it.

Maxim

Re:Stupid is as stupid does

> advising students that they risk lost job opportunities

Strange. When I seek for jobs I worry much more about employers not knowing me enough rather than they know me too much. And no employer will be bored enough to actually read every message in your blog to find your "most silly moment" before he decides whether to hire you.

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

"Where are the safeguards?"

It's called common sense. There should be no safeguards. If you're stupid enough to blab to the world about drunken panty raids then you deserve the consequences. As for the sexual predator thing, well, you have to educate your children about the danger and make sure they never meet anyone from the internet in real life without some heavy digging and never by themselves. Besides, the person they are meeting will probably have this same issue about privacy so you can find out a lot about them. Anyway, I know others are going to say this. It is not myspace's responsibility. It is the user or the user's guardian that is ultimately responsible.

Re:Stupid is as stupid does

"fear of sexual predators and other unsavoury types"

Don't worry, CmdrTaco doesn't really have time to read comments anymore.

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

Sounds like more of a problem with your kids, frankly. The danger of sexual predators has been blown way the hell out of proportion...Your kid is still far more likely to be molested by someone you know. It's typical media scaremongering...The number of reported cases of actual assault/molestation are crazy low.

Might as well ask where the safeguards are at your local high school...The opportunities for trouble there are way the hell greater than on MySpace or similar.

The concern for privacy, however is much more real. You don't have to show your tits to be compromising yourself to future employers and current school administrators. I wish like hell I'd never started posting under my own name...I ought to change it, but Satanicpuppy has such a nice ring...

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

Good grief we live in a culture of fear... How many young people have been damaged on Myspace? I know a few teens that spend lots of hours on the site, and I must say, they are pretty normal. But you know if one girl gets abducted out of the gazillion like her that are registered on Myspace it will be bloody HEADLINE NEWS!!!! How long have we had these stories of the big bad Internet? I feel like the producers at (major cable news network) are just hoping that there will be some sort of weird sexual predator mania with a million victims across the USA that propagates from the dark corners of Myspace just so they can say, "I told you so!"

The young people on this country that are in trouble are from impoverished households, have abusive parents or suffered some real life trauma that did not involve a website. They have problems not because of myspace.

Yea, spending your life on-line gabbing is probably not healthy, obviously, but relax folks. Tech-savvy, pop culture suburbanite kids are not the troubled delinquents of society.

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

Between sexual predators, kids who tell all and then regret it when it comes time to look for a job, our daughters posts nearly nude photos and our sons enjoying that a bit more than is healthy, these are a bad idea. I just checked the traffic numbers for Myspace, 3rd most popular in the US and 5th on the planet... Where are the safeguards?

Where are the safeguards? In your home. In your school, and in your church if you believe in that. The behavior of your children is YOUR responsibility. Not mine, and nor it should be the Government's - there is far too much censorship already. Stop asking the Government to think of the children, and start thinking about your own. Spend time with your children, ask them to explain how MySpace or whatever works and educate them in how to use such things safely. Or ban them from them if you're that kind of parent.

Social networking adds nothing new to the World, it just makes it easier to see it. Which is a good thing. (I'm willing to except, rather than accept, MySpace as a good thing though, just from the tech pov.)

Ok, I'm a pornographer and biased. Freedom of speech is still the most important thing on Earth, social networking is an important aspect of that, so please don't spoil it with some foxnews-fud-fuelled family values jihad. Predators make good cheap easy copy, but they are far more dangerous in a shopping mall than they are online.

The irony of Fox News spouting fud about MySpace while being part of the self same organization that owns it is not lost on me. Nor is the fact that other networks will spout fud about MySpace for reasons of competition.

Social Networking is a global coffee shop

The only difference between "social networking" on a forum or one of the Web 2.0 sites and the chit-chat in a local coffee shop is that everyone can hear the gossip and commentary unless the content is deleted. Even then, archive sites still sometimes keep copies of the "embarassing" content.

If you're not willing to take the heat of people looking for someone to blame or hate, don't post. And never, ever forget about issues like libel and slander, because even the best of wisecracking comedians get tagged as producing "hateful" material by people and groups that have a chip on their shoulder.

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

Author is a dumbass. There is a huge difference between some idiot putting their information on the internet and the government forcing us to broadcast our information via RFID. If he doesn't realize that something wrong with him..

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

... Where are the safeguards?

The only place it has ever been; in our own hands.

Yes, our hands are frail and prone to error, particularly in youth. Such it is, such it has always been, such it always shall be.

Oh, what fools these mortals be. Get used to it.

KFG

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

It's hard to create safeguards when we're not even sure of all the negatives.

I remember before there were consumer protection laws, and if you bought a defective car, too bad sucker. That was the way for years. Am I going to argue that all safeguards are an infringement? No. Am I going to argue that we're figuring it out? Yes.

Please don't apply simple "take personal responsibility for the fact the world sucks and hates you" rules. We can make it better, but we have to know what's wrong first.

It's nice once in a while to talk about what's right, but, yeah, that's not nearly as sexy and frightening.

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

Where are the safeguards?

Welcome to the real world, your actions have consequences; deal.

Don't the price of freedom? You're free to relocate to Saudi Arabia.

Re:Stupid is as stupid does

These are the reasons I decide to post anonymously at Slashdot.

I just post under a nickname and don't post addresses, photos, etc. You may know me by Technician, but you would be hard pressed to associate to me at a local store. Hmm.. What town?

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

Where are the safeguards? There is an private profile option on myspace in the settings to change it to a private profile. Here is how to do it . Just click on home then click account settings , then click on privacy settings. Under Who can view my profile check on friends only. Scroll to the bottom of the page and then click on change settings. You are done. Your personal stuff can be there be only viewed by your friends. No big deal. No need to panic the media hype over myspace is just insane. Myspace is the most popular social networking site with over 100 million profiles. There are safety precautions on the myspace site for parents and ways to keep a private profile.

Who could possibly imagined...

That our re-introduction to accountability for socially inappropriate public behavior would be brought to us by MySpace and Google?

Re:Behave

Internet is much more like a big mall. But it's not a big truck.

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

Aside from your "sexual predators" comment (there are no more sexual preditors on the internet than any other form of social gathering or communications), all those other problems are due to self righteous bastards who should minde their own business.

When a person hires an employee, it should only matter that they will show up on time, do their job, and not cause problems in the workplace--like harrassing people because they don't follow a "one true religion" and such. And excluding someone from a job because they appear naked somewhere on the internet or even in pr0n, is doing exactly that. Beleiving it is wrong to be naked or have sex is a religious edict, nothing more. The manager who makes decisions based upon people's personal lives should not be hired. They are there to make the company run smoothly, not to try and enforce their moralistic beliefs on others.

I used to live in a place where the majority was a particular religion. They would constantly complain about perceived wrongs against people of their faith, yet they would be prejudice against everyone else. And if you looked into where they were "wronged" you would find out the people attacking them were really just defending themselves or retailiating against some really evil thing the "one true followers" did. They got to the point where the military had to be called in, and they'll mention how the government sent troops, but they'll leave out the fact they murdered nearly a hundred people including smashing in the heads of babies. Do you think it is right to smash in the heads of babies just because they weren't born into the "one true religion"???

If you didn't go to their church, they would not only refuse to be your friend, they would tell lies about you behind your back and do everything they could think of to screw you. They want to kill you, but they are afraid of the government, so they just do everything else they can think of. Just try holding down a job when after the wrong person/people find out you don't go to the "one true" church, they do everything they can think to either get you fired or make you quit. The others go along with it because they believe it is the right way to act, but they are to afraid to start things on their own.

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

1, I have no children, so this isn't a 'my daughter this' or 'my son that' post... 2, Every couple of months I see a couple of kids get involved in things that are illegal or immoral that is traced back to MySpace. I'm not picking on them for any other reason that 80% of social networking traffic is on their site. The Aol chat rooms were just as dangerous and in 5 more years MySpace will be gone and something else will be the most popular thing on the web. The danger is real, although a bit sensationalized. I just don't want to see any more kids in trouble when we know unsupervised time online due to parental neglect or lack of knowledge or whatever cause gives kids more freedom than they can handle. Sure, its 'harmless'. Until its your daughter in lingerie or your son who can't get a job... And thats before you start talking about the more serious types of trouble they can get into.

Re:Expressing yourself in the Information Age

>The problem is that we are allowing employers and other individuals to act as if we are doing something wrong by posting a comical video or a blog of out personal political thoughts.

That's only half of the problem; the other half of the problem is that people are unwilling to accept the fact that what they say will be used against them in the court of public (and private) opinion.

>Will the internet ultimately become a way to limit information and enforce conformity or force anonymity on anyone who wants to share their views.
Yes, in exactly the same way that pop-culture and majority opinion has served to reinforce the dominant society and repressed dissenting views (eg liberals). It will perpetuate a social reinforcement feedback loop of people wanting to do only what is approved of by the most uptight member of society for fear of reprocussions.

This is already happening in Asia, eg the korean person who was harassed after having pictures posted online of her not picking up after her dog.

>I think not.
Then you are wrong, and you need to reasses what is realistic.

>The current trend seems more likely to reshape society than it does to be shaped by society.
This is what the punk rockers thought, as did the hippies before them; both groups were assimilated and their subcultural strenths and uniqueness blended in and used to the advantage of the dominant society. The exact same thing will happen with this.

> People will embrace more open expression and churches, parents, and employers are just going to have to get used to not judging people on their internet posts or being sued for doing so.

This is what the hippies said about the mores and repression of the 1950s; but the 90's made the 50's look like the 60's, and 9/11 and served to turn all of us into good little neo-cons.

This too will be assimliated and used to the advantage of the dominant culture; probably to cull out those who are unfit or unwilling to conform to the standards of the community.

more scary statistics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_visite d_articles [wikipedia.org]

The list of french people on wikipedia is the third most visited page! Who will safeguard us from the new generation that will grow up and know about french people?

Also note the scary interest in the Basic programming language, *shiver*

Re:Social Networking is a dangerous idea

your that hysterical idiot yelling WONT SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN aren't you? the internet doesn't need any safe guards, thats what parents are for. and once your in college, your an adult and if you post stupid shit on a myspace blog that gets you into trouble... welll welcome to being an adult and having to take responsibility for your actions.