On net, mind your footprints
Here are your average computer-savvy urbanites, many of them teenagers. They use Twitter for bursts of personal information, Flickr for photo-sharing, YouTube for uploading private videos, Facebook for keeping track of friends and acquaintances, and other sites for work or hobbies.
It's an electronic blizzard that tends to obscure reality. It's quite possible that some of today's popular social networking sites could become electronic Frankensteins.
There is an invisible downside to social networking on the Net and I suspect that many people who are on Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn are so romanced by the technology that they are unaware of the electronic footprint they are leaving for all to see.
Social networking sites were started to keep small communities like college students in touch after graduation. Their popularity and the business side of the model meant they had to expand subscriber bases. So now we have 20 somethings and 50 somethings on the same page, all revealing intimate details of their personal life. That's a risky exposure.
In the UK, the Information Commissioner, a watchdog body for IT, recently warned that millions of young people could damage their future careers with details of themselves they have made public on such sites if potential employers did a web search.
Facebook is a prime example. It faced a backlash over its move to expand the service, for business reasons, by adding two features, News Feed and Mini-Feed which allowed users to track information updates of other subscribers.
These updates could include such personal information as a decision to break off a romantic relationship or start a new one. When users objected, Facebook did a mea culpa and added stricter privacy controls. The catch is that computers, Blackberries or mobiles give the senders a false sense of anonymity and new microblogging sites like Twitter, already hugely popular, encourage exposure of mindless gossip and intimate personal details. US President Barack Obama tweets, so does actress Mallika Sherawat who is less discreet about her personal life.
Twitter is a free microblogger service that enables its users to send Tweets, text based posts of up to 140 characters in length, which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users, or 'followers', who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. In essence, however, Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties.
Twitter is a good way to keep in touch with busy friends but some users succumb to the temptation to tell acquaintances and other users who they are with or what they're having for dinner. The allure of the digital world tends to lower defences and the need for privacy. It's time to take a harder look at what people call 'hippy blogging', the subliminal urge to globalise your personal life.
Ashok Boudh
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