Most online profile forms ask for a lot of information such as home towns, profession, affiliations such as alma mater, religious practices, volunteer activities, friends and family. People post voluminously about their opinions, products that they use and services that they patronize. Some such information would seem to be harmless. Whether or not I like broccoli won’t seem to have any consequences until the day I bid for a job to market broccoli. Merchandisers are already mining social networks for consumers and advocates ("influencers"). On the other end of the ‘innocuousness’ spectrum is information about our political activities. It is the duty of citizens to be politically engaged, to vote and support candidates, but many decision makers who can significantly affect our lives would penalize those who disagree with their politics. One company offers a tool to monitor employees' activities on social networks! Now, one’s political donations are searchable on the web!
So far, I've only talked about the public web. There is a huge, perhaps even larger body of content on 'private' webs. Most social networks claim that their sites are protected from search spiders, as are many databases such as voter logs, employment databases, criminal records, phone logs... but that information is accessible, ultimately with a court order.
What recourse or remedy do we have, if we’ve already blabbed too much, or the ‘wrong’ stuff about ourselves, online? Some obvious steps are:
- Do a web search for oneself to see what’s out there.
- Revise our online profiles
- Delete material that we no longer want known about us
- Tell our social media contacts not to tag us
- Start posting information that we want known about us. There are few and fuzzy grey lines between ‘being positive’ and shameless self-promotion, or uber-political correctness.
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