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I’ll admit it. I am old enough to be a privacy dinosaur. Having started my computer education back in the Pentagon, I still recall all of the times that I requested information and was told that I couldn’t have it because I didn’t have the requisite “need to know”. It’s hard for me to reconcile the trend nowadays that everyone on the planet has the need (if not the obligation) to know absolutely everything, no matter how minute, about everyone else.
Something that has not changed over the years is (1) the fact that there is, in this country, no constitutional right to privacy (although half the U.S. citizens, when polled, believe that it is so written) and that (2) in the interest of self-preservation, our Congress tends not to pass laws that have a chilling effect on re-election fund raising, and this includes restrictions on those companies whose inventory is data about the comings and goings of the citizens.
You may remember when you were a kid that your mother may have told you “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” The point being that mere words can’t do any real damage to you. I guess you were supposed to remember to “duck” for the more physical threats. (What was wrong with our parents telling us these maxims, anyway?) Well, the world has changed. A lot. Words can cause serious and lasting damage, worse than a bruise, which will heal relatively fast.
1. For example, in a dangerous turnaround, your may find that your texts, e-mails, SMSs, MMSs and surfing history may come back to haunt you in legal proceedings and investigations. With the advent of “e-discovery” (discovery of electronic messages, see LAWS), companies, ISPs, employers and service providers have an obligation to archive electronic communications even after you think you have deleted them from your cell phone or computer.
2. Text messages can remain on cell phones for several days, even if they are deleted. And communications companies store them internally for anywhere, from days to a few weeks. AT&T, for example, says it saves, at most, text messages for 72 hours; Verizon, on the other hand, saves them for between 5 and 10 days. And they may even live forever (see #14 below). Text messages now outnumber voice messages three to one; monthly messages sent or received jumped to 584 per person in the quarter ending in September, 2009, a 60% increase from the previous year, according to the Neilsen Company. And hundreds of millions of cell phones have software from Carrier IQ installed, logging everything you browse to what you say on your text messages.
3. Court discovery rules (see LAWS) routinely allow discovery of text and e-mail messages and expect that companies properly maintain archives and backups of this data so that they may be discovered for civil and criminal litigation purposes. Divorce cases also use text and e-mail messaging for investigation and litigation, having a profound effect on how these types of cases are played out: Consider the cases of Tiger Woods (Jamie Grubbs and others came forward with text messages about his ”transgressions”); Kwane Kilpatric, (former) Mayor of Detroit (text messages on government-used mobile phones and pagers showing his affair with an aide) and Nevada’s Governor Jim Gibbons (whose wife produced over 800 text messages to his mistress in 2007). Even without investigators, a suspicious spouse might just decide to look for illicit text messages: Christie Brinkley divorced Peter Cook after simply reading his text messages to a girlfriend. The point: Once confronted with your own writings, it’s usually “game over”.Social media is the new court of public opinion. And it can be used for “shaming.” Take, for example, the case of Mary Bale, (see VIDEO) who in 2010 had been filmed picking up a cat by the skin of its neck and tossing it into a garbage bin. Within a day, she became the object of global derision, her name and address published on an internet forum, the subject of hate pages on Facebook and YouTube re-enactments. She became the subject of virtual mob justice. Similarly for companies: Consumers who once might have called customer service are instead publicly embarrassing companies on the Internet instead. The lesson: Social media on the Internet can be a double-edged sword. You should remember this!
4. Since privacy laws were largely created in the pre- and early Internet age, the present Internet is pretty much a privacy free-for-all, allowing the U.S.Government, and specifically law enforcement, the unfettered right to read the data on the Internet and act on what it finds. And private industry is largely unregulated in this regard as well, the Government treating corporate espionage and data tracking as a “corporate thing”. This can often be bad news for the “Tell-All” generation which is used to sharing each and every thought and action across the net with their friends, family and strangers. No longer can it be said, as it was in the beginning, that “Noone knows you’re a dog on the Internet.” [See original New Yorker cartoon on the right>>]
5. These days, simple surfing the Internet is no longer the benign, innocent pastime it was in the beginning. Your every move is being tracked for money and for decisional information. You don’t want to surf the net for anything that could come back to bite you. If you search, even on your smart phone, for information about diabetes or liver disease, car theft or home robbery, how to euthanize a pet or elderly parent, how to build a bomb or the like, even if it’s for someone else’s information or for a news report or school paper, that information may well be recorded without your permission and used against you at a later time.
The New York Times reports (12/13/09; 2/5/12) that the Government is increasingly monitoring FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers, political protestors and deadbeat dads, often through deception about who they actually are. Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. CNN reports that DHS issued an $11 million contract in 2012 to track information on the net. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”
6. Even though laws allow people to challenge false information in credit reports, there are no laws that require data aggregators to reveal what they know about you. If I’ve Googled “diabetes” for a friend or “date rape drugs” for a mystery I’m writing, data aggregators assume those searches reflect my own health and proclivities. Because no laws regulate what types of data these aggregators can collect, they make their own rules. In short, you are whoever Google says you are. Hence the new set of companies like reputation.com, reputationchanger.com and Elixer Interactive which clim to help business and individuals manage their online reputations. On the counterattack, Google claims all such companies are scams and that the Google data cannot be controlled
In 2007 and 2008, the online advertising company NebuAd contracted with six Internet service providers to install hardware on their networks that monitored users’ Internet activities and transmitted that data to NebuAd’s servers for analysis and use in marketing. For an average of six months, NebuAd copied every e-mail, Web search or purchase that some 400,000 people sent over the Internet. Other companies, like Healthline Networks Inc., have in-house limits on which private information they will collect. Healthline does not use information about people’s searches related to H.I.V., impotence or eating disorders to target ads to people, but it will use information about bipolar disorder, overactive bladder and anxiety, which can be as stigmatizing as the topics on its privacy-protected list.
The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital surfing patterns and you may never know why you’ve been turned down. This is because stereotyping and profiling are alive and well in the area of data aggregation. Your application for credit, school admission or job application could well be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of “aggregate” data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. So, for example, if baseball players or lawyers are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at the Yankees website or e-mailed a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. In the 1970s, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University named John McKnight popularized the term “redlining” to describe the failure of banks, insurers and other institutions to offer their services to inner city neighborhoods. (The term came from the practice of bank officials who drew a red line on a map to indicate where they wouldn’t invest.) So you might be denied credit or employment, not because of your credit history or resume, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of Web sites you visit. NYT reports that the CIA, through In-Q-Tel (its investment arm), has put money into Visible Technologies, a software company that crawls across blogs, online forums and open networks like Twitter and YouTube, to monitor what is said (much like Echelon and Carnivore monitored telephones and faxes in the pre-Internet era). It’s most recent investment has been in Palantir, a big data technology company which can connect disparate threads of database information to detect terrorists, deadbeats, etc. The Government is, of course, also capable of monitoring communications and locations through such devices as geotags, GPS, back-doors into encrypted chips and other public (read:Government) intrusions that would be absolutely illegal and subject to prosecution if done privately. When the spy in the movies removes his cell phone battery to disable the GPS tracking, he’s not kidding. And when he uses an “onion router” to gain untraceable access to the Internet, this is actual software. Whether it’s used for good or evil may be in the mind of the user. Government investigators are routinely trained that “the end justifies the means” such that denial, entrapment and lies can be told so long as they get their information in the end. Remember that. [Much of the information in the three paragraphs above comes from Lori Andrews, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy” as quoted in the NY Times, 2/5/12]
7. Effective March 1, 2012, Google is initiating new privacy policies, claiming that is “getting rid of over over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read.“ That’s only part of the story. Actually, Google will now be able to pull together everything it knows from a number of its products, rather than individual isolated ones. For example, since YouTube, Gmail, browser search histories, Google+ posts, photos and profile pages, on line purchase information and other less known Google products can trace information about you, they are now able to connect the dots in order to “profile” you and target advertising to you. That profile may be right, but it also may be incorrect. Because you may have checked out X-Box games to order (for your grandchild, it turns out), you may be profiled as a 20 year old. Or you may have researched certain health issues (from prostate cancer to HIV) for a relative or school and, along with data that places the IP address of your computer in Florida, determine that you are a 65+ year old with health issues, which might cause insurance or employment problems. Since Google analysis cannot (as yet) show motivation (i.e. why) people buy things, it is still somewhat flawed. And, while users can opt for Google not to track certain types of data, like search histories and instant messages, the only way to prevent Google from sharing the information it does collect across sites is by setting up different accounts to use with each Google service.
8. Not only do companies profile you based on your web surfing habits, but you should not be surprised to discover that those coupons (printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones) and “loyalty program” benefits are packed with information about the customer who uses it, such as their name, Internet address, their FaceBook page information, the search terms that the customer used to find the coupon, the sites used to search for the coupon, and perhaps a general dossier on the customer, complete with a shopper identification number. Corporate “Data Mining” is big business. For example, a retailer could know that Carol Jones printed a 15% off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Monday at 9:03am and then redeemed it on Friday at 7:30pm at the store. None of this tracking is visible to consumers; all of it is perfectly legal. Didn’t you ever wonder why, only three minutes after clicking on a weight-loss ad, you started getting gym membership pop-ups and banner ads? Coincidence? Not. In fact, many consumers, who use Blippy, Twitter or the like, actively encourage it. Much of it is handled by a company called RevTrax, which creates and tracks the coupons on retailers’ web sites and elsewhere. There’s a term coined for this: “Search Inversion”. This means that those Internet search tools which help users find products have been turned around by companies to create “profiles” or “identities” of consumers which are bought and sold in order to permit those companies to use the same Internet to target their wares to those consumers. See also, Big Data, Quants.
9. Add to this the increasing use of HTML5 which, by using a process which makes it possible to store large amounts of data on a user’s hard drive while online, also makes it possible for advertisers and others to see weeks and months of personal browsing data at the same time. Also the advent of the “supercookie,” which stores information in about ten places on a user’s computer, not just one, making the cookie difficult to delete, even by experts. Also the advent of the “supercookie,” which stores information in about ten places on a user’s computer, not just one, making the cookie difficult to delete, even by experts. [The supercookie was developed by Samy Kamkar, creator of the Samy Worm back which took down MySpace in 2005. He calls it the “Evercookie” since it’s intended to stay on your computer, somewhere, forever.]
Of course, just looking at a web site can start the “tracking” ball rolling. On August 13, 2010, the Wall Street Journal published a survey of the top 50 web sites in the U.S. by search firm Quantcast to see how many tracking tools they embedded in their visitors’ computers. The results showed that many used more than 100 such tools; only Wikipedia had none. These rather sophisticated monitoring tools can reveal a lot about those who browse the web.
10. And don’t think that, just because you use the programs on your cell phone, you’re exempt. A study released in August 2010 from the Lookout App Genome Project revealed that 33% of iPhone apps and 29% of Android apps can reveal the user’s exact location, and that 14% of the iPhone’s free apps and 8% of the Android apps can tap into the user’s phone contact information. This is primarily because 23% of iPhone apps and 47% of Android apps have embedded third-party code, such as code that enables ad-supported content, onto the devices. Another recent study by SMobile Systems found that as much a 20% of third party apps on the Android phones requested permissions that would compromise privacy if users are not careful.
In short, there should be absolutely no expectation of privacy for anything you post on the net. Back in year 2000, Scott McNealy, head of Sun Microsystems famously said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” There could be legislation or case law on this subject soon. See LAWS. Concerns about FaceBook’s data collection and dissemination policies have become so intense that the U.S. Congress is planning to introduce legislation about what information can legally be shared on-line (See below). Moreover, on 12/14/09, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether a police department violated the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages (some of them sexually explicit) sent and received on a government pager. This decision may be a narrow ruling, or it may indicate the Court’s position on broader issues. O’Conner v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709 (1987). (The lower court concluded that the employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his office.) NOTE: In July, 2010 the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling and held that government employees shouldn’t assume that their electronic communications are protected against unreasonable searches so long as their employers have a legitimate work-related reason for the search.
11. Talking about living forever...The U.S. Library of Congress, which bills itself as “the universal body of human knowledge,” has announced [NY Times, 4/14/10] that it will archive the collected works of Twitter, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 to 65 million messages, as "an entirely new addition to the historical record, the second-by-second history of ordinary people.” This will be just one part of the “Web capture” project at the library, an effort to assemble Web pages, online news articles and documents, typically concerning significant events like presidential elections, terrorist attacks and the like. Privacy concerns? None. After all, the vast majority of Twitter messages are publicly published on the Web already. While the archive is to be available only for “scholarly and research purposes,” how long can it take for the Government, divorce lawyers and others to search this data mine for their own predictable purposes. Don’t think just because you erased a Tweet that it doesn’t live on forever!
12. If you are concerned, you should periodically check the privacy settings on your social networking sites to understand and possibly restrict the extent to which your content is shared. FaceBook, with its more than 500 million registered users, makes its information public by default. It is also the number one source for malware and clickjacking (see SECURITY for examples). Even one of its own software engineers, Mike Vernal, blogged (NYTimes, 10/18/10) that the company had recently learned that several apps (in fact, the top 10, including FarmVille and Mafia Wars) were passing the user ID to outside companies, such that outsiders could identify FaceBook users and possibly their friends names, for the use by advertisers and Internet tracking companies. Remember that Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data and it makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details — like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment — and then runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States. Moreover, Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are minor compared to Google, which took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads.
13. I used to post how to customize the Facebook privacy settings at this point. However, over the past five years, Facebook has had so much bad press over its privacy policies and so many compromise agreements with the U.S. and oher governments, that they seem to be changing them almost weekly. Although they’ve made it easier to edit, you should still make the assumption that, unless you specifically edit the privacy options, you are probably sharing everything you say, post and comment on with the entire world. Certainly this is so if you accept the Facebook default privacy settings. Even if you limit everything to share only with your friends (which is what I recommend), there are still many things you just can’t control. For example, while Facebook allegedly allows you to turn off the “instant personalization” feature that allows partner sites like Yelp and Pandora to gain access to personal data, there may still be the equivalent of “community pages” that automatically link to some personal data, like hometown or college, to topic pages for that town or school. That’s a proprietary algorithm that can’t be edited. And anything you share on a friend’s page, where you can’t control their privacy settings, will allow it to be shared further, and cannot be taken back, even if you remove the post from your own site.
The Facebook changes introduced in September 2011, called “real-time sharing” take away even more privacy. For many music, TV shows and Hulu, games, news and other sites that you log in with your Facebook identity, that information will automatically be shared to and by Facebook. Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing”. is the company's new permissions protocol, which says that apps only need initial approval to post activities on your behalf. Once you install the app and authorize it to post stories on your profile and news feed, it'll never ask for your permission again. So, if you’re a closet Barry Manilow or Glee or Scrabble fan, everyone will know it. This is obviously good for Facebook and its app makers, as they’ll collect more and more data about your likes and dislikes and track you across the web. Other than creating a database of your travels, what does it do for you, though? And, because there is no “like” button to click if you listen to a song through Facebook, it’s automatic, you have no choice. Moreover, with Facebook’s Open Graph, app activities will now appear in the News Feed, Ticker, and on your Facebook profile. Facebook does this because they hope that by sharing your activity everywhere, your friends will be more likely to install apps you're using, further helping brands increase awareness. To protect yourself, your highest level of security against oversharing will be audience selection: You do have the opportunity to select an audience with which to share your activity upon the initial installation of an app (In the drop-down list, under "Custom" your friend lists are displayed). Finally, you can always revoke an app's permissions by going to the App Settings page and clicking the "X" next to the app to delete it, or click "Edit" to change the audience selection.
UPDATE: On 1/24/11 FaceBook modified its policies and has settled out with Germany, allowing German subscribers to individually modify its Friend Finder service. On that same date, both Mozilla and Chrome (Google) announced features that would allow users of the Firefox and Chrome browsers to opt-out of being tracked online by third party advertisers through plug-in browser extensions. In addition, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 has added a feature named Tracking Protection that relies on blacklists to block sites that the users don’t want to share information with. Microsoft is still routinely collecting and displaying personal information about you on your Hotmail and LiveMail email pages. And in March, 2011 Google settled its FTC charges of deceptive privacy practices stemming from Google’s Buzz (which automatically included users’ e-mail contacts in their social network) by agreeing to start a privacy program and undergo privacy audits for 20 years. Buzz is now defunct, but Google+ started in 2011 and has privacy rights by circle, not overall, in response to Facebooks privacy problems, so you now have a choice (but see changes to the Privacy policy effective 3/1/12, discussed below). In August, 2011 Facebook also added a tagging option for users to confirm or remove their identity before it appears on their profile. In late 2011, the U.S. FTC settled charges that Facebook misled users about how their private information would be used, with Facebook agreeing to obtain users’ consent before making “material retroactive changes” to its privacy policy.
BUT THEY JUST CAN’T HELP THEMSELVES: In December, 2010, Facebook introduced face recognition software (called Tag Suggestions) on every one of the 500 million users accounts (some 20 billion photos, adding 100 million tags each day). Facebook’s biometrics for each photo allow photo recognition the same as that used by law enforcement, which used the software to pick up 19 “criminals” at last year’s SuperBowl. Remember, with FaceBook, you’re “opted in” to new features unless you specifically “opt out.” And don’t forget that once you “tag” information on Facebook, it stays on-line (not just on your own computer, like iPhoto) and it stays on-line forever. In June, 2011, U.S. privacy groups filed complaint with the FTC claiming violation of users’ privacy as well as the European Union. Same for Google. See, Facial Recognition. On the positive side, one of my clients suggested that the feature (when opted-in) could be used at airports to identify you and speed you through the check-in process. Compare “facial detection” which perceives human faces but does not identify them with “facial recognition” which does identify individuals. Facial recognition is poised to democratize surveillance, heralding the end of anonymity. Immersive labs, a NY company, has developed software for digital billboards using cameras to guage the age range of its viewers; SceneTap, a Chicago company, uses cameras with face detection software to scout local bars, reporting ratios of men to women and other data.
You might also want to change your search settings not to allow Google and other search engines to access and index the information you have marked as visible by “everyone”. In the Account Settings option, under the FaceBook Ads tab, two options are automatically turned on to share information with advertising networks and friends, so anyone who wants to keep this information private must uncheck the boxes in that tab. Also, to disable “autotagging on Facebook” click HERE for instructions.
Google got in hot water in Germany (and also Canada) for what the government calls a “blatant disregard for personal privacy” and its admission on May 14, 2010 that its Street View software has been collecting but not necessarily using so-called “payload data” (the actual information being transmitted by users over unprotected WiFi networks, hence the moniker “WiSpy”) further inflamed the issue. The Spanish Internet association Apedanica has also sued Google over this issue as well.(Google claimed that it generated $54 billion in economic activity last year - at least some part of this must be due to its data collection techniques, wouldn’t you think?) In June, 2010, it was found that Apple iPhones andiPads with 3G connections have been collecting information about where you’ve been in a “consolidated.db” file as far back as one year ago. In April, 2011 Apple released a software update (IOS Ver. 4.3.3) to eliminate this feature, explaining that it was intended to collect information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi points, not to collect customers’ personal data or to track their whereabouts. But in February, 2012, it was found that Google had bypassed the blocks in the Safari browser, and was tracking browsing information on iPhones, Macs and iPads.
It’s up to you to review your privacy settings. The default is public sharing; the choice is to opt-out manually. And EPIC has filed numerous complaints with the U.S. FTC about the lack of privacy for personal information posted on these types of sites.
Even if you’re part of the “tell-all” generation, do you really want the entire planet to know your birth date and other personal information, likes and dislikes, sexual preferences, religious views, political opinions and the like? And to see possibly compromising photos? As I said above, if you wouldn’t want your mother, priest, human resources director, boss, girlfriend, wife or the IRS to know these things, don’t share them with “everyone”!
14. Watch where you engage in SN: For example, don’t engage in social networking at work or on your work computer. First of all, read your employee policies or rules, whether they are contained in an employment contract, employee manual or written memos. A majority of companies make it a firing offense to engage in social networking or personal web surfing on company time. Companies use a variety of desktop surveillance from companies like CryptaVault, Work Examiner & TimeDoctor to monitor your Internet use, either through desktop screenshots or proxy servers (which you have to go through in order to get to the Internet, and which keep a log of your activity). So don’t think that using Gmail or Hotmail guarantees you privacy, just as HTTPS or encryption may still not protect you from your employer’s keystroke loggers. If you’ve been notified that your employer may monitor your activity, you’re history. Don’t think your company is doing this? A 2007 American Management Association survey found that two-thirds of responding employers were monitoring their employees’ website visits, 43% were monitoring their e-mail and 28% had fired workers for e-mail misuse. Think again. And don’t FaceBook when you’re in jury duty, like Jacob Jock, a 29-year-old graduate of Ringling College of Art and Design, who was dismissed from jury duty and sentenced to a three day jail sentence by Sarasota County Circuit Court Judge Nancy Donellan after the defendant, a young woman, disclosed that he had contacted her via the Facebook social media website as the trial began in December, 2011.
15. And don’t forget to opt-out of the geotag feature on your mobile devices, otherwise you may be providing others with the exact location of yourself or your property without wishing to do so. See the discussion under Pictures (No. 6), above, for more detail.
Other considerations: Don’t use readily identifiable information as password hints (Forget your password? Don’t name your dog, high school, mother’s name); Don’t let social networking sites helpfully “scan” your address book for “friends”; Don’t pay your bills while on a public Wi-Fi site and always make sure it shows an encrypted connection (shown by a little lock or colored address line); periodically Google yourself to see if any personal information is on-line. You get it... Finally - - keep your computer safe! Especially if it’s a laptop, treat it like your wallet, as it can be easily stolen.
16. Of course, there’s another side to Internet control: The recent actions of the Egyptian government restricting Twitter and Internet service during citizen protests have highlighted the interests of the government in restricting access in situations which might become exacerbated by such disclosure, whether right or wrong. Also, book and newspaper publishers have a legitimate interest in protecting their original content. The Wikileaks controversy points out the government’s interest in keeping classified materials from leaking to the Web. Parents seek to shield their children from cyberbullying or sexual predators. Corporate types and public figures struggle to keep rivals or enemies from slandering them or their businesses, products or offices or stealing their trade or other secrets. Not all internet control is, after all, bad. But, these days, it seems that virtually everyone is as terrified of being watched, filmed, photographed, uploaded, downloaded, re-treeted and shared whatever they are doing (see below) as they enjoy doing the same to others.
Social networking sites are quite useful for many personal and business purposes. On the one hand, you can waste lots of time, possibly offend people, breach confidentiality and confuse your branding, be it self or corporate. On the other hand, it’s an easy way to access business or personal contacts, link to publications, piggy-back on to events, provide status updates, establish conversations with like-minded people and convey your personal or brand image.
But you still have to exercise the same judgment on line that you would exercise in a personal setting, or you can expect serious consequences which cannot be undone. Remember, once posted on-line, even if it is removed, your words or pictures still may have been copied and repeated across the Internet (like the [prank]) Domino’s Pizza video on YouTube in 2009 showing workers picking their noses and sneezing on the food while preparing sandwiches) and may be around for eternity if it is. (Yes, they were found, fired and convicted, but even today the information is still out there on the Internet.) And, as you can read from the discussion above, you must be constantly vigilant, because those who find it financially advantageous to invade your privacy, even if not strictly illegal, discover new ways to compromise your identity and data daily.
See also, Texting, Big Data, Quants, Blogging, Twitter.
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