It’s been interesting to watch reactions to Facebook’s changes in their privacy policy. Status updates of some of my friends have outlined how to change privacy settings by unclicking a box in the administrative options of a profile. Then I saw an interesting post on Beth’s Blog about a movement called Seppukoo (named after the noble death of samaris who threw themselves down on their swords) to get people to cancel their Facebook accounts and reclaim their lives.
I haven’t felt very strongly about any of this because I’ve always felt that anything I post on the internet, whether it’s a tweet or a blog or a status update, can be accessed by anyone with enough tech skills.
For example, you can have that unflattering photo of you taken off a website but then there’s still The Way Back Machine, which is a browseable web archive. Name other examples of ways people are attempting to be stealth online and I’m willing to bet there are a few websites about how to get to the information anyway.
Even non-tech people can get to a lot of information relatively quicky. I can’t even get my printer to work but when a friend wanted to find out how old a guy was (he wouldn’t tell her), I found it within five minutes. On an obscure dating website that required registration no less.
My point is anything you write or post on a website, in a closed community or not, your information is indexed by search engines or otherwise stored somewhere in the interwebs. My life is pretty much an open book, whatever I choose to discuss online is anyway. And yes, that’s easy for me to say since I am at this point only responsible for myself. I don’t have kids to protect or a boss to please.
Just remember that your online life is public too. This Facebook announcement is a reminder for us to choose carefully what we post. Because privacy on the internet is just an illusion.
What do you think about online privacy? What steps, if any, have you taken to ensure you’re protected?
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