As of this moment take a look at your Facebook account and then look at the Groups section. Notice any difference. Wait a minute! You left the group years ago, why are you magically back. Or perhaps you’re a Group administrator and in a blink of an eye all those people you booted are BACK reading and downloading.
Yes, there was a time when you could kick and scream about privacy. One could maintain a clandestine existence. Today, not so much. Rather than rejecting various forms of online socialism, which doesn’t work, people are starting to realize today’s world is more about controlling message rather than existence.
You can no longer adequately control where your name or business may pop up. What you can do, however, is control the primary message. There are certainly steps that one can take to get ahead of the game. Routine credit checks, buying up domains with your name, Googling yourself to see if anything strange or unexpected has emerged.
Those are all public image concerns, but we all know the real potential problem is what’s behind the closed door. Although your email remains relatively safe (so long as you have a great password), most people have been lulled to sleep by the slow and receding privacy expectations held for website and social media platforms.
There was a time when everyone was up in arms about the information credit cards kept about your spending transactions. Nobody cares about that anymore. Then there was/is concern pertaining to cell phone identification numbers that track your every move (literally). And now, of course, we act all surprised and shocked the free platforms like Twitter or Facebook happen to have a privacy hiccup.
The only thing Facebook needed to seemingly do, alarmingly to some, was bump into a switch somewhere and BAM! All of your history and old groups are back in a flash. Imagine what other information they have. Imagine what info Google has about your search histories.
Everything you do online leaves a footprint with someone. Take for example yesterday’s announcement in Canada that bittorrent firms, or rather their users, are going to be getting a surprise court date for downloading movies. Your ISP was forced to make your identity known.
NOTHING seems to be safe anymore, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Legislation will always for permanently play catch-up to the industry. As such, consumers have, for the second time, been lulled into a false sense of security that is largely dependent on the goodwill of for profit firms. Nobody reads privacy policies, we just scroll down and click ‘YES’.
What can you do to protect yourself? Well, no much. You can’t control what gets out there, and what get’s out there by accident.
What you CAN, however, control, is what content you make available and what your participate in. That means Facebook is no longer the dumping ground for your life’s story. Foursquare isn’t an auto-ping to your every move. There’s a certain level of anonymity that can be achieved if we stop participating. Of course, if we do that we give up the whole reason we got into this mess in the first place–the chance to be social.