May 2, 2010
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I can't deny that "Foursquare" for your phone is a neat idea as a social networking tool to "give you and your friends new ways of exploring your city." It even helps businesses by rewarding users to visit a place constantly by giving them achievement titles. Social Networking + Tour Of The City + Real Life Game. Oh I forgot to add one more thing to that, plus "Personal GPS." You let an application tell the world exactly where you are and that could become a security issue. It's like willingly allowing "Big Brother" to know where to find you. A site like http://pleaserobme.com/ even brought up this issue of "over-sharing" by listing all the updates that has the phrase "left home" in their status. That's undeniably taking it too far by telling the world that you literally just left home.
With today's social networks, there's something of a need by people to tell their friends where they are. The idea is that you are mentioning what you are doing as your status update, and often that involves saying where you are. Nowadays It's so easy to share a private information like that it's scary, even if it's only intended for the eyes of friends and family. I've been guilty of doing that myself on Twitter and Facebook, by doing a status update saying I'm at this or that event. If somebody wanted to stalk me, all they have to do is keep an eye on my status updates. Thankfully I'm not obsessive enough to say that I'm at a Starbucks in so and so, but I still realize the risks in even mentioning a general area of my location to the internet.
It comes down to choice, share or don't share. You can also just say "I was at..." minutes to hours after the fact, but even then that's still something to track. Either way it's important to know the risks involved with over-sharing your information to the internet. Chances are, most people don't care where you are or what you are doing, but it only takes one person to take advantage of this, and turn it into a nightmare.
Comments (2)
You know you're actually hard to get info on the web purely by your web presence (I just played a game by pretending not to know your real name). I was only able to grab the following for free on the web and mostly from archived pages and old postings:
Real Full Name
email (obviously) and some of your old emails and aliases as well as old postings
Names of several ppl you know closely
Previous Address
High School (you've gotta kill classmates, it opened up everything else)
College
Country of birth
Ethnicity
Countries lived in (Amazingly nothing about nationality)
MM/DD/YY DOB
Recent pics (duh)
This brings back memories: http://uk.oocities.com/tokyo/9152/
So that was just the initial passive search, I'd have to get more involved to go further (prolly phishing (you have an amazing amount of social engineering background info to make these attacks more successful), county records search, hanging out at previous addresses)
This is sort of a hobby since I'm a privacy freak but could you imagine what a pro can do? I'm probably going to check out Erasing David when I have more time. There's also this awesome talk about the end of privacy (this video kinda got me started trying to figure out how this stuff is done).
Personally, a search for me turns up a lot but nothing embarrasing so I don't care. I do hate what's available via "Public Information" though. You can't request a takedown notice on websites publishing it. I'll have to eventually work on how to deal with that.
@darren_macintyre - hey e-mail me your findings, I'm kinda curious as to how accurate those information where. Where the info was taken from, and also what you used for your search query. Shocked about previous address info and what not. Was that all from College info / Classmates.com? Was it my personal e-mail address too and not my spam address? cuz I hardly used my personal one online, so I'm curious about that as well.
LOL at finding an archived copy of my old geocities JPOP page, cuz that does bring back memories.
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