When you consider those that work and are actively social online, just how much information about ourselves do we really reveal?
Think back to the recent Project Gaydar scandal, where two MIT students constructed a program that could tell, with striking accuracy, if a person was gay by analysing their friends list on Facebook.
Now, we have the Canadian Police using social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to bait and trap potential criminals and predators. Nought much wrong in that but you’ll hear plenty say that it is further proof of the erosion of privacy online.
The counter reaction to that is anything posted online isn’t safe from prying eyes – from emails to private facebook profiles.
We have created Cyber Bullying, Online Identity Theft, Internet Criminal League Tables, FOAF Profiling etc.. all within a raging digital cloud in a matter of a few years. And still we continue to add fuel to the fire. It is expected that those who have an active online social profile will spend a minumum of 50% of their browsing time on social sites as early as the middle of next year!
Not everyone I know has a Facebook page or uses Twitter, in fact a large percentage of my friends and family just ‘ain’t, that interested’. Perhaps, their the lucky ones!
People have been sacked based on evidence gathered from social networking, so no surprise the police are started to use it for profiling. BTW there’s a typo in the post title “watch”.
Cheers Nick, got it sorted now, doh!