In an article written about 2 weeks ago Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted saying, "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." The article is citing an interview the Wall Street Journal had with Schmidt, which eventually led to Schmidt declaring that "every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites."
Is this truly the future of search on the internet? The article, written by Jason Kincaid for TechCrunch, says even changing our names would be pointless, citing the possibility that an entire industry would emerge just to help companies or our prospective employers of the future find out our original names. But then anyone could access that service.
Possibly rendering this extra industry innert is the fact that Google can now recognize an individual with only fourteen photos. And this is present day. My question is, how will our practices regarding personal (or embarrassing...) information that we put on the internet come back to haunt us? This information isn't private, and it won't be able to be made private in the future.
We won't even be able to hide from our past by changing our names, according to this article, given the permanence of social media information. So what happens when you slip up and there's a picture with you in your car with the license plates visible? When there's a picture of you at the gas station holding your debit card? Or when a friend posts "Happy birthday!" on your wall even when you don't have that information available to the public (its just a good friend that happens to know your birthday). It's a little scary to think about the fact that piece by piece we are constructing shrines for ourselves... these memorials of who we were that offer too much information, possibly, about who we are to people we don't want knowing about us.
Essentially, given the permanence of social media, we should be careful we aren't giving up personal information in those embarrassing pictures or letting those dated "happy birthday" posts remain up on our walls...
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
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I'm glad that someone posted on this topic because it is something that I have thought a lot about over the past 2 or 3 years. For me, the biggest threat among all the social media outlets is Facebook. Twitter can be equally dangerous (as we've seen with all the athletes getting in trouble for saying things), but at the moment I've resisted joining Twitter. The thought of changing my name in the hopes "covering my tracks" hadn't even crossed my mind. But the point about an industry that assists companies in finding out your true name is a very real idea. I had real somewhere that besides the obvious "don'ts" (like putting your cell number, address, employer, etc.) on your Facebook page, that it is a very bad idea to have your highschool, birthday or specific activities listed on your page. These are things we often don't think about, but do pose a serious threat. Credit card scammers could use your birthday or whatever information you have on there to steal your identity. Further examples like having your license plate or whatever in your pictures could also result in a serious breach of personal security. Despite all of these drawbacks, the majority of people in our demographic still decide to have a Facebook. I know I myself am guilty of this. My question then becomes, why do we do this? It seems like drawbacks far outweigh the benefits of Facebook. God willing, none of us will be denied employment or be robbed because we had an inappropriate status one day or left a Happy Birthday post on our wall. Protecting ourselves, our future and our identity are always things to be considered.
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