Slashdot Mirror
Social Network Users Have Ruined Their Privacy
Steve Kerrison writes "'There's little point in worrying about ID cards, RFID tags and spyware when more and more people are throwing away their privacy anyway. And the potential consequences are dire.' I've written an article on the dangers of social networks and how many users seem to forget just how public the information they post can be. This follows a warning sent out by the CS department of Bristol University, advising students that they risk lost job opportunities, getting in trouble with their parents and more, if they don't take care. The warning, however, really applies to all social network users, be they college students or over-zealous blog posters."
There is a difference between throwing your freedom away, and having it taken away against your own will.
News flash: If you say dumb things on the Internet, someone might notice.
How this constitutes a hazard unique to "social networks" is neither explained nor hinted at.
The article presents a non-issue wrapped in snark and hype.
While the consequences may be as dire as you claim, this is not certain. Even if true, it may still be rational for people to tell all on the web.
In the mid nineties a friend of mine who was putting a game-theory heavy education to work as a top notch security consultant claimed that we had passed a phase boundary and that privacy was essentially dead. At which point he started "living publicly," doing things like making his daily schedule (in detail) available to the world, sending all his receipts (for everything) to the IRS,etc.
When challenged on this rather odd behavior, and asked what he was trying to prove and to whom, he replied that he wasn't trying to prove anything to anyone except perhaps himself. His thinking was that having no privacy isn't nearly as bad as having no privacy and not coming to terms with that fact. He then walked us through a few cases (such as blackmail) and showed whywhen you were better off not getting in the bind of acting as if you had secrets when in fact others knew them.
Perhaps the MySpace people are at least subconsciously reacting in the same way to the growing threats to our privacy--by getting it all out there, so if anyone tries to use it against them they are effectively immunized.
--MarkusQ
When posting something online about yourself consider is it something you'd want your mom, your boss, or a sex offender to know about. Why? Because all three of those will have access to it. If the answer is no in any case, then don't post it. Don't assume that they aren't savvy enough, Google has lowered the barrier so almost anyone can find what they want. Don't rely on technical protections of sites either, especially sites explicitly designed for sharing information.
The web is public, that's just how it goes. Don't put personal information on it that you don't want the public to see, and yes your mom is part of the public.
>> Where are the safegaurds?
With the parents, of course. Adults control the world children live in, right? Once your kids are adults
(and the transition to adulthood starts around age 8, earlier for the smart ones), if you haven't taught
them basic common sense (not common whatsoever IMO), then it's on you. We're supposed to limit
the ability of people to communicate with one another? Communication is, after all, what you make of it.
Maxim
So what? Cry me a river, but how stupid do you have to be to put up embarrassing personal info and pictures damaging to your reputation, and then be surprised when they are used to be embarrassing and damaging?
I had a friend who put up a simple myspace page, and thought it was anonymous, and was shocked when using just the nick and e-mail she had, i was able to trace it through other pages to get her home address and phone number. Took 3 minutes. People don't think. And no amount of legislation or news stories will change that.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
One of the benefits of having a more open and honest society will be the acceptance of practices most people do but few admit to doing. In this respect, social networks mean social progress.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
puh... close one, I was born in 1989... but seriously, a lot of my friends at school are pretty stuck in this social networking thing. One girl at school even flew to aberdeen to date someone she met over myspace... I am so glad I hate myspace... After reading a book called "crypto" by Steven Levy, and reading about Diffie and Zimmerman made me realize how precious privacy really is. I am not as private as I could be, I gave my website URL to slashdot, and on my website I have my real name somewhere, and on other websites I am not nearly as private as I should be, but I am not telling every schmoe out on the internet what I did last weekend.
ugh...
> advising students that they risk lost job opportunities
Strange. When I seek for jobs I worry much more about employers not knowing me enough rather than they know me too much. And no employer will be bored enough to actually read every message in your blog to find your "most silly moment" before he decides whether to hire you.
"Where are the safeguards?"
It's called common sense. There should be no safeguards. If you're stupid enough to blab to the world about drunken panty raids then you deserve the consequences. As for the sexual predator thing, well, you have to educate your children about the danger and make sure they never meet anyone from the internet in real life without some heavy digging and never by themselves. Besides, the person they are meeting will probably have this same issue about privacy so you can find out a lot about them. Anyway, I know others are going to say this. It is not myspace's responsibility. It is the user or the user's guardian that is ultimately responsible.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
Erosion of privacy is when personal details about your life are taken from you. It's when police chiefs talk about tapping everyones home or looking up library records without a warrant. If I willfully give away information about myself then I never did consider it very private then, did I? This crap about lost opportunities, while perhaps partially true in today's freakishly religious climate, will not be such an issue as these things become more common. This is absolute proof that the minority voice controls the world. Damn near everyone has to lie about who they are because they're afraid everyone else lives some higher "moral" standard and will look down on them. This is simply not true. Even the noisy types who push this false sense of morality on us hardly practice what they preach. As a global community develops and communication with the entire world becomes simple and cheap the world will shift as knowledge becomes free. You will no longer have to worry about losing your job because there is a picture of you with a joint on someones myspace page or your hair is dyed neon blue. The transition period will not be smooth, but I welcome the day. All this article does is beg us to continue living in fear of some invisible and nonexistent moral majority. I, for one, refuse.
It is already happening. The company I work for was founded by two young entrepreneurs that grew up in the age where knowledge was free and they learned that masturbation won't cause hair to grow on your hands or your dick to fall off. They learned that the D.A.R.E. cop that told them the story of the young man who died from ONE hit from a joint was LYING. They realized that nobody else they grew up with believed this horseshit anymore either. They only care about your skill and your work ethic. As the younger generations start to take back this world it will become a better place to live because of the global community and available, simple worldwide communication.
Do not fear it. Embrace it.
Kudos to being on slashdot at age 16-17, but please tell me that you're really some creepy old guy or a dog posing as a teenager. I don't think I can take the fact that some born in 1989 is posting on slashdot. And seriously, you should do everything you can to erase all links between your online persona and your real one. Have two, it's fun. You can be careful what you say with your real one, and do what you like with the other.
On the internet, no one should know you're a teenager.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
The only thing that the social networks can change is that previously, you could be an idiot and no one noticed until it was too late. Now, it's easy and fun to make your idiocy known to the world.
I once got a job because someone saw me writing somewhat-smart-type comments on Usenet.
If I had a web design company, I'd hire people who can make their MySpace page have interesting content, look good and pass W3C validation... =)
I used to have a friend whose name was Robert Smith. I felt sorry for him, having such a common name. In today's world, it has its advantages. Anyone trying to dig up dirt on him with Google is going to have a difficult job.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Things aren't "private" if they're willingly disclosed. Warning people against providing genuine home addresses, or phone numbers, via the internet is, perhaps, valid advice - however, teenagers regularly disclose mobile numbers to people they barely know in "real life" scenarios, and there's as much chance of something happening in that kind of situation as there is in an electronically-based one.
I believe that these concerns are just left over from an ageing population that doesn't really trust modern technology, or thinks that anything besides face-to-face communication is unnatural. I'm sure people once thought this about telephones, too.
Sounds like more of a problem with your kids, frankly. The danger of sexual predators has been blown way the hell out of proportion...Your kid is still far more likely to be molested by someone you know. It's typical media scaremongering...The number of reported cases of actual assault/molestation are crazy low.
Might as well ask where the safeguards are at your local high school...The opportunities for trouble there are way the hell greater than on MySpace or similar.
The concern for privacy, however is much more real. You don't have to show your tits to be compromising yourself to future employers and current school administrators. I wish like hell I'd never started posting under my own name...I ought to change it, but Satanicpuppy has such a nice ring...
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The right to privacy is an important one, because it provides us with refuge from totalitarian authority that would seek to enslave us, to use information about us against us. But even more important than the right to privacy is the right to live freely. One might say that the right to privacy is important insofar as it is one of the pillars that support the right to live freely.
How can one live freely if one must hide behind privacy in order to avoid getting in trouble with various authorities? If one can only be a dissident, contrarian, or black sheep if one hides within the safe confines of one's own skull, is that not what we used to call in oldspeak "oppression"?
I see a bolder way, in living openly, freely, and standing up against those who would punish us for exercise freedoms. To use an easy example, if recreational drug users were a unified voting block, they could take over the country in an election cycle. But because the law makes it dangerous to use drugs recreationally, users are forced to protect themselves with a shield of privacy (which has been steadily eroded by the war on drugs over the years). If everyone would just stand up and openly do what they believed in, they would not be politically isolated and would not be able to be pushed around.
Similarly, the gay rights movement really started picking up steam only after people began coming out of the closet in droves. Privacy protected them, but it also contained and enslaved them. By stepping out into the public realm, they have forced society to deal with them, and through the necessary struggles that are still ongoing, have found increasing acceptance in our culture.
It's true that if you are a fool, and do stupid things, and people find out about it, your life will become more difficult. But there is a difference between foolishness and good people standing up in order to live the lives they wish to choose. Let the fools of the world weed themselves out of the breeding population, but let oppressors and would-be oppressors everywhere quake at the thought of a brave world of proud, public freedom-weilding citizens who are unashamed to let the world see their lives in a warts-and-all nakedness, which really is more beautiful than the idealized, airbrushed nakedness once you realize that the latter is a hollow lie, and that truth is the only substance out of which we build our lives.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Good grief we live in a culture of fear... How many young people have been damaged on Myspace? I know a few teens that spend lots of hours on the site, and I must say, they are pretty normal. But you know if one girl gets abducted out of the gazillion like her that are registered on Myspace it will be bloody HEADLINE NEWS!!!! How long have we had these stories of the big bad Internet? I feel like the producers at (major cable news network) are just hoping that there will be some sort of weird sexual predator mania with a million victims across the USA that propagates from the dark corners of Myspace just so they can say, "I told you so!"
The young people on this country that are in trouble are from impoverished households, have abusive parents or suffered some real life trauma that did not involve a website. They have problems not because of myspace.
Yea, spending your life on-line gabbing is probably not healthy, obviously, but relax folks. Tech-savvy, pop culture suburbanite kids are not the troubled delinquents of society.
Social networking adds nothing new to the World, it just makes it easier to see it. Which is a good thing. (I'm willing to except, rather than accept, MySpace as a good thing though, just from the tech pov.)
Ok, I'm a pornographer and biased. Freedom of speech is still the most important thing on Earth, social networking is an important aspect of that, so please don't spoil it with some foxnews-fud-fuelled family values jihad. Predators make good cheap easy copy, but they are far more dangerous in a shopping mall than they are online.
The irony of Fox News spouting fud about MySpace while being part of the self same organization that owns it is not lost on me. Nor is the fact that other networks will spout fud about MySpace for reasons of competition.
But reading the quote, one wonders who is this Andrew Jallon guy. Well, a quick google and you can see check out his discus and shotput attempts (not very good). PUBLIC real-estate tax records give a strong implication as to where he lives. And finally, Andrew Jallon's bigoted comments end up on Slashdot. Did he expect this? Should he have expected it. Should we all be paranoid about every post...lest someone take it and run?
The privacy issue du jour in these past two decades has been homosexuality. You can't tell by looking at someone if they are gay. It shouldn't matter if they are or not, but many people (who I will declare as narrow minded pricks) do think it matters. Not only will these type of people judge homosexuals unfairly, another subset of these people may commit violence upon homosexuals.
Employers can judge you for any number of reasons. Employers are also looking for any reason to filter you out and judge you even before you can prove to them that you'd be a great employee. I don't like the fact that employers judge me because I have a socially and politically charged blog of my own, but I must come to terms with that by hiding it from them so they can't use that against me.
People make bad judgements for stupid reasons, and make stupid decisions based on those bad judgements. Those decisions affect people's lives. The fear of you or your family not being able to survive is a great motivating factor to not post intimate details of your life online for everyone to see. If you must, keep it anonymous.
Society isn't open because there are too many closed minds. There is then no other choice but to hide information that close minds should not see. The last thing I need is my son or my job taken away from me because of some idiot reading something I posted which has nothing to do with either my work ethic or my ability as a parent.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Never. The only difference between now and The Good Old Days(TM) is the distance that information about you can be obtained from. Where as in TGOD(TM) you actually had to get off your butt and travel to the town a person lived in to have a chat with the local town gossips, now you just need to check google. But it's all the same. Small towns meant everyone knew everyone and all about them. Larger towns and cities gave us anonymity but people don't want that, so large cities breed loud and bold types to stand out so that people see them. The internet and social networking just makes it easier for us to stake our claim in the public square and let people know about us. In the end though, it's all the same, anyone interested can find out anything they want about you, they just have to search for it.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It's hard to create safeguards when we're not even sure of all the negatives.
I remember before there were consumer protection laws, and if you bought a defective car, too bad sucker. That was the way for years. Am I going to argue that all safeguards are an infringement? No. Am I going to argue that we're figuring it out? Yes.
Please don't apply simple "take personal responsibility for the fact the world sucks and hates you" rules. We can make it better, but we have to know what's wrong first.
It's nice once in a while to talk about what's right, but, yeah, that's not nearly as sexy and frightening.
On a blog, I can write what I want and give up as much or as little of my personal information and thus my privacy as I want. An RFID tag in my passport is forced onto me, with or without my consent.
The key difference here is whether the person wants to give up his or her privacy. It's their decision. I'm a firm believer in personal freedom, and if someone wants to hold their naked butt into the webcam, together with their phone# and address, it's their decision.
Today, more and more decisions are taken out of our hands to "protect us". I don't want to be protected. I want to be free. Freedom of choice is what makes us human. That's one of the few things I agree with with the bible boys. After all, according to them Adam ate from the tree of knowledge and thus we're forced to choose between good and evil.
I kinda don't want to revert that.
Let them choose. Inform them of the implications, but the choice is theirs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You forgot one: anyone who claims to be 13 is an FBI agent.
Man, you really need that seminar!
This little tidbit from the blog of a LEO (sheriff). And yes, his boss knows about it and he doesn't say anything in it that he wouldn't want the whole world to know.
... interesting ... locations, hmm-'kay?
Had a young gentleman put in an application at work last month. Looked sharp! Sounded sharp! Folks everywhere were all sorts of happy.
Unfortunately, the officer doing the background checks put the applicants name into Google and came up with his MySpace account.
Tip for the Wise: if you're going to apply at a Law Enforcement agency, take the paean to the Mighty Marijuana Plant off your MySpace page, along with the albums dedicated to photos of you imbibing the Wonder Weed in various
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
The same sort of leakage can occur with a blog, on an ordinary personal page, or via a much-forwarded email message.
.microsoft.com address. Similar behavior is known within pretty much every release of MS's systems. If you're running Microsoft software, you should assume that anything on your computer is accessible to Microsoft any time you're connected to the Net. Not understanding this is simply naive.
;-)
Actually, it's quite a lot worse than that. It's quite easy for things on your computer that you consider "hidden" to become public knowledge.
For example, I've had many discussions with people over ways to hide things online, so that you can access them if you know the URL, but the URL can't be found by any method other than guessing. The best-know is hiding stuff behind an index.html file, but there are other methods.
A problem with this is illustrated by recent discussions of leakage via the google toolbar. This is a useful tool, and lots of people use it. But there have been many reports from people doing web testing (and thus watching the server logs) of an interesting phenomenon: If you have the google toolbar installed, and use your browser to access a "hidden" web page on your server, you will sometimes see a visit by Googlebot to that URL soon after, often within a minute or so. And soon after that, a google search will find things in your "hidden" page. Google "google toolbar googlebot" for more information.
What's going on is that the google toolbar is running as part of your browser, and it has access to the browser's data. This includes the URLs of all the pages you visit.
I mentioned this case first because it's not a Microsoft product, and I didn't want to distract people by starting off with MS bashing. But, of course, MS is notorious for leaks like this, and they're generally not accidents or bugs. When the very first MS internet capabilities came out, engineers quickly reported seeing unexpected modem activity when "nothing was accessing the Net". Investigations showed that the activity was due to listings of the contents of the disk being transmitted to a
In a similar vein, there was the fuss a couple of years back, when msn.com was caught extracting things (mostly images) from customers' "private" data (mostly email) and using them in advertising. The first reaction was for msn.com to point out that the TOS stated that any data on their servers was their property, to do with as they wish. They quickly realized that this was a major PR blunder, and publicly backed off. But again, if you think they aren't doing such things now, you're just naive. You should expect that any ISP will behave this way if they think they can get away with it.
We also had a lot of discussions here of the Sony CD rootkit. Who would have thought that just "playing" a CD would install spyware in your computer? Well, we now know, and some of us are a bit less naive.
Open-source software is much less likely to contain spyware, but it's not guaranteed. The mozilla-suite browsers are open-source, but have you actually dug through the code? If not, you could easily be victimized by any new release, or by any plugin that you install. Granted, there are lots of people on the lookout for spyware in the most-used open-source software, but they might not have spotted the more subtle problems. And the google toolbar shows how easy it can be to trick users into opening their system up to outside access. MS isn't nearly the only culprit here. (They're just the most brazen and unapologetic.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Social networking sites increasingly get you friends, appointments/engagements, and jobs. Yes, people who previously didn't might now exclude you based on the public information about you, but so many more people know about you and can connect with you that you may just be better off.
What we're seeing is the tipping point at which the risks of giving up some kinds of privacy are overcome by the undeniable power of the network to create and maintain social circles (and all of the advantages that they confer) by uniting like-thinking folks at a rate never before seen.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The lessons taught don't need to be specific to technology or anything; I was always taught, for example, the whole "Don't go with adults you don't know" line of reasoning, and it just seemed natural to obscure my information from the outside world at first. Now, obviously, my information is a lot more accessible, but I have less to be afraid of.
My point, though, is that if the children learn a basic framework for what is and isn't a good idea, the parents don't have to teach them individual applications within the framework.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
As a parent, I was blissfully unaware of the dangers of myspace. Having gottent the general idea of how stupid and pointless it was, I never bothered to visit. Of course, I have repeatedly informed my children of the danger of carrying on conversations with total strangers. So I thought I was covered. Bu the other day, out of curiosity I checked myspace to see if my stepson had an account. It turns out he did, but that the profile was private. Now, I would guess that his profile was private because he doesn't want us (his parents) to see, not because he doesn't want some stranger to see. He probably has all kinds of inappropriate stuff on his myspace page that we would get upset about, so he has it private. This is just a guess, but the fact that he has a picture of himself wearing only boxer shorts on his front page, with a description of himself as a wrestler and his interests as looking to meet people on the internet pretty much means that everything we have told him he has pretty much thrown away and done the opposite.
Now I am sure that a legitimate operation like myspace properly notifies parents that their underage child wants to create an account and automatically grants the parent full access, so I am sure they will be sending me that information shortly.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It's even more simple than that: If you feel that you'd be ashamed of something you say or do, you really need to ask yourself why you are saying or doing it in the first place. Perhaps you could more easily get away with it before, but that doesn't make Myspace the bad guy for allowing others to see who you really are.
Remember when it was AOL chatrooms that were full of perverts (still are, I'm sure)? There's always some big bad scary thing, and most of them can be disregarded.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Gee, he's warning kids that if they post on myspace, then the older generation (parents and future employers) might disapprove. Of course, the kids don't care, and why should they? They don't WANT to live in the same culture as their parents. Personally, I find the myspace culture to be preferable to the older culture. With everybody's flaws exposed on the internet, people will learn to be more tolerant of others' shortcomings, and tiny mistakes and personality quirks will no longer seem scandalous. (For example, do you remember the Howard Dean scream? Why should something like that disqualify somebody from the presidency?) The older generation is just a bunch of stuck-up, blissfully ignorant whiners, who are upset that their children aren't conforming to their expectations.
Aside from your "sexual predators" comment (there are no more sexual preditors on the internet than any other form of social gathering or communications), all those other problems are due to self righteous bastards who should minde their own business.
When a person hires an employee, it should only matter that they will show up on time, do their job, and not cause problems in the workplace--like harrassing people because they don't follow a "one true religion" and such. And excluding someone from a job because they appear naked somewhere on the internet or even in pr0n, is doing exactly that. Beleiving it is wrong to be naked or have sex is a religious edict, nothing more. The manager who makes decisions based upon people's personal lives should not be hired. They are there to make the company run smoothly, not to try and enforce their moralistic beliefs on others.
I used to live in a place where the majority was a particular religion. They would constantly complain about perceived wrongs against people of their faith, yet they would be prejudice against everyone else. And if you looked into where they were "wronged" you would find out the people attacking them were really just defending themselves or retailiating against some really evil thing the "one true followers" did. They got to the point where the military had to be called in, and they'll mention how the government sent troops, but they'll leave out the fact they murdered nearly a hundred people including smashing in the heads of babies. Do you think it is right to smash in the heads of babies just because they weren't born into the "one true religion"???
If you didn't go to their church, they would not only refuse to be your friend, they would tell lies about you behind your back and do everything they could think of to screw you. They want to kill you, but they are afraid of the government, so they just do everything else they can think of. Just try holding down a job when after the wrong person/people find out you don't go to the "one true" church, they do everything they can think to either get you fired or make you quit. The others go along with it because they believe it is the right way to act, but they are to afraid to start things on their own.
I think the reason why people throw away their privacy so easily is bcause privacy is a stupid concept anyway. What do you really gain from privacy? People can do what they want without other people knowing? Oh that's a good one - so instead of openly admitting and discussing things we allow silly tabboos to fester while we scurry around trying to hide our sins. We allow true crimes to stay hidden. We hide from ourselves and each other. Hell yes, gimme some of that.
Stop hiding in the shadows. Step into the digital sunlight and shout your secrets to the world. You'll find some criticism but with it you'll also find a lot of people with similar interests, problems, and lives. You'll find friends and lovers. You may even find a good job.
You don't have much choice anyway. We're quickly moving into a society where it's possible that you're being seen, heard, and tracked anywhere, at anytime, by anybody. That is both a curse and a blessing but it's just the way things are going to be. We'll all be better off if we let the skeletons out of our own closet, on our own terms, than if we try to fight and let someone else expose us.
Ready or not, you're no longer alone - ever.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
How do you intend to prevent such a thing?
Right now, there is only one site that I know of that archives+republishes old web pages on a large scale: the Internet Archive. Google News and a few other sites do it for USENET. It is neither possible nor desirable to prevent the archiving part, but it is easy and simple to put restrictions on wholesale republishing, and to enforce them.
If you cannot stand behind what you're willing to say in public then don't say it.
No, I'm not willing to have every word I ever said available for quoting out of context. If you don't understand why, then you don't understand how conversations, debate, and free speech work.
I used to use nynms based on my real name. Having a stable career and a family to think of changed my mind on that score.
And that's precisely why we should think about stopping republishing of archived materials in the way that the Internet Archive is doing.
I most certainly won't count on copyright law or any other sort of law to prevent that from happening.
These are not black-and-white issues; restricting sites like the Internet Archive and Google News would not give you complete protection, but they would permit people to participate in discussions significantly more openly.
If you really wanted to get information about your stepson's myspace account go make a myspace account and pretend to be a hot girl close to his age. Then send a friend request. If he accepts you now have access to his myspace account. If he doesn't accept then maybe he is following your advice because he is rejecting a complete stranger.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
http://xkcd.com/c137.html
Ignoring, more or less, your pugnacious tone, your argument seems to boil down to the claim that revealing passwords, PINs, etc., or things (such as your SSN) that are effectively used as such, is somehow equivalent to revealing the sort of personal information (sexual orientation, political affiliation, taste in music, and so on and so forth) that people might reveal on MySpace. And further, you somehow assume that anyone who does things that I won't do for you on demand must lack the "ability to reason in a logical fashion" or be "an utter idiot."
I of course beg to differ.
Your first point is clearly nonsense (a claim you can easily disprove by providing links to a few dozen publicly available MySpace pages with SSN's, bank account numbers, PINs, and the like).
On your second point I would claim that anyone who would reveal password-class information to a person like you, on an open web forum or not, would be the utter idiot. On the other hand, I have no qualms about telling you that I'm a fiscally conservative life-long registered Republican who voted a straight Democratic ticket in the last election because I'm tired of seeing our country run into the ground by a pack of clueless morons, no matter which party they ran under. I like classic rock and some modern stuff, but can't stomach more than a little rap or new age. And so on and so forth.
In case you still don't get it, the point of being "effectively immunized" is to not live as if you have any personal secrets that you wouldn't tell your boss / parents / spouse anyway. If you're going to prance about in undergarments that aren't gender appropriate, put up a web site detailing the whys and wherefores, and then if anyone tries to blackmail you by threatening to "out" you say "Oh good! Give them my URL while you're at it; I could use more page hits" and that is pretty much the end of it.
--MarkusQ
Recently there was a manager of a local shop, he'd been shipped in from another part of the country to open a new store in the town where I work. Or I should say, used to work as I just moved onto another job myself.
;)
On his own private MySpace, he described the town as a "shithole". Somehow (mostly because it's one of those towns where everyone knows everyone else offline and online) this myspace entry got passed around and eventually quoted in the local newspaper. He subsequently received death threats from residents, caused a massive public outcry and got sent back to his hometown to be "dealt with internally" (presumably, lost his job.) Even though these were his own personal opinions on his own personal MySpace, those were the consequences.
It wasn't just him hurt - the general public being as stupid as they always are, they chose to harass other employees from the same shop who had nothing to do with his views and didn't necessarily agree.
One could easily argue that said town *is* a shithole, especially given the retarded way that its residents responded to what was a personal opinion on a social networking site that had nothing to do with the person professionally or his company. But in case anyone traces me back too (extremely trivial, I've given my website) - no, I'm not saying that it is
The lesson? I don't know. I guess it would be - lifestyle choices, getting drunk etc really shouldn't be a major problem. Everyone acts stupidly now and again. But think extremely carefully before you openly slag off other people or places online because without the appropriate care it has a good chance of getting back to them and you will suffer the consequences. By all means call the town you work in a shithole, but for goodness sake do it using a screen name on a site where you can't easily be traced back to yourself as an individual. The more sensitive the comment, the more precautions you should put in place.
For the ultimate protection, never ever under any circumstances say anything that you don't want the entire world to hear and misinterpret. Now, that's practically impossible (I try to keep my personal website as close to that as possible though, and just a couple of weeks ago my interviewer commented on my weblog in the interview itself - I knew this was always likely due to the email address I use. It was positive. I got the job.) It's about weighing up the risks and whether you are prepared for the worst case scenario. If fragments of my previous paragraph got quoted (out of context) in the same paper, I'd be looking at similar problems - however given how late I am in posting a comment to this discussion, how few non-nerds bother to read Slashdot let alone the comments etc, I have made that calculated risk. In that worst case scenario, I'm ready to reply to the newspaper and point them to the full comment and make any necessary clarifications.
The bottom line is that it's all about judgement. You should think about how your comment can be taken by different people, what the consequences would be, what the likelihood of that comment being used against you actually *is* and either don't make the comment in the first place or take a *calculated* risk. Not just go spouting anything and everything on the most public site on the internet. Kids are not so good at making those judgements, but then nobody should be having a go at you later in life for something that you wrote when you were 13 anyway. I'm talking about adults here.