The Electronic Tattoo.

Yesterday was Data Privacy Day and to accompany the important message that this day aims at broadcasting, it’s only right that I contribute with a blog post addressing the extent of your privacy on the internet.

With a vast array of media outlets and services that are available to us and we undoubtedly use on a daily basis, it’s become easier and more relevant to ask the question: Where does all my information end up? The answer to this question, though I’m sure it’s dependent on several factors, would scare most people.

As we have become more and more reliant on the internet and its “user-friendly” functionality, we need to be aware, now more than ever, that the internet is essentially a giant (if not infinite) database where information is stored and kept in one way or another. A good comparison would be your computer at home. When you delete something and then empty the Recycle Bin it doesn’t actually get deleted. Instead the “path” is deleted and eventually overwritten by another file. However, on the internet files and information aren’t deleted; they are cached and float around in the internet abyss forever.

Paying bills, buying stuff on eBay and Amazon, posting comments on YouTube or someone’s Facebook page, and even posting blogs; these are all things that a lot of us do every day. However, we need to be aware of the fact that nothing is 100% safe guarded on the internet. No matter how safe a site claims to be or how many security filters they put your information through, if someone wants your information, and they know how to get it, they will.

In one of my more recent blogs about Facebook’s privacy issues, the referenced article illustrated a perfect example of this by interviewing a Facebook employee who told of the unethical usage of private member information by Facebook employees. Scary enough, but this is just one example of how vulnerable your information is, an example that someone actually admitted to--imagine the misconduct that doesn’t get reported.

In a recent article by John Dvorak from PC Mag, the author called it “electronic tattooing”, a term that I became very fond of a few years ago. His analogy is very effective as he compares the act of posting unnecessary, revealing, and most of the time stupid information on the internet to the act of getting a dumb tattoo. Dvorak goes on to say, “Posting dumb things on the Internet is worse. At least there's a painful process to remove the tattoo. The Internet has no such safe guard. If something actually does disappear, that's just luck”.

The author makes a valid point. Nowadays you can just Google someone’s name and see what comes up. Most likely your first results will be some sort of social network that they use. From there you can see most of their general information, and with companies like Facebook and Google working together to make sharing information online easier and more efficient, everything is more out in the open.

Because of this susceptibility, it’s important that if you do use social networks that you don’t post anything that you will regret and that can potentially come back and nip you in the rear. With the way today’s society is running, it’s very difficult to not be part of some sort of social network, and this is exactly why people need to take caution.

Perfect example of how to shoot yourself in the foot.

At Yoursphere, we put our members safety and privacy first as our baseline standard. This standard should be applied across all sites.

Can we collectively agree that this first generation of social-networking citizens (us), scarred in some cases with a "dumb" tattoo, should apply those learnings now to the next generation: our children?

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