Like it or not, there’s a lot of information about you online that could be easily discovered by a spammer’s spidering software. Social networking sites that include your personal or professional profile are a great potential source of data for spammers. The fact is, the goals of commercial social networking sites and of spammers are the same (eyeballs = money). But there’s a way you can avoid being a target of personalized spam. Take control of your online identity by scrubbing yourself.
Recently, I've started getting emails from Spock.com, a Website that features a search application to help you find friends and colleagues online. As far as I can tell, this site is a marketer's dream -- it not only aggregates searches of multiple sites, it also organizes and tags data from other social networking sites. It’s like a little semantic Web that I didn't ask to be a part of.
So, I decided to try to take control of my online identity. Since Spock seems to be the latest and biggest threat to my ability to shape who knows what about me, I started there. In order to claim your identity on Spock, you need to create an account. After cursing Spock’s green-blooded, inhuman, Vulcan logic, I gave in and signed up. I soon discovered that Spock’s main goal was to gather more information about me. It was clear that I needed to go to the source and clean house.
The first step was to create a list of every Website where my profile was publicly available. After I got up to about 20, I started to get worried. It’s not so much that I care how much information is out there -- I voluntarily posted most of it, after all -- but I feel that it's necessary to keep it all up to date. For instance, some Websites still say I live in cities I moved away from five or more years ago.
I finally decided to cancel my account with any site I hadn’t used in more than a year. Then, I would scale back my profiles on social networking sites to only a few words or a link that would positively identify me. If anyone really wants to know what my favorite books are, they can ask me.
Once I started this online project, I realized the more information I removed about myself, the better I felt. I’ve been posting personal data about myself willy-nilly on sites I don’t control for the last 10 years. The job of scrubbing my identity from these online locations is going to take some time. For the sake of my peace of mind, and to stem the coming tide of personalized spam, I consider the effort worth it.
Content aggregators like Spock.com are here to stay, and they’re only going to get smarter about collecting our personal information. I no longer consider these sites to be the real problem. The key to avoiding widespread mining of your personal data by marketers is to shut off or limit the flow at the source. Start off by doing a Google search for yourself and see what comes up. You may be surprised at the number of Websites where your profile is listed.
Some of you may be able to afford paying someone else to help manage your professional and personal online identity. Online services like, ReputationDefender, Naymz, and ClaimID are available to address this need.
I think the bulk of people on social networking sites are still too young to worry about whether their MySpace profile makes them look foolish. When this tide of users graduates and starts looking for jobs, they’ll quickly be interested in finding out everything that’s being said about them online -- and getting rid of the content they don’t like.
MySpace Bug Leaks 'Private' Teen Photos to Voyeurs AND CAME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT WE SHOULD NOT PUT OUR ONLINE PRIVACY TO THESE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES. it seems they don't have the motivation to protect our online identity and it seems very paramout that we take control of our identity. It should be our prerogative and i think the measures you explained are ceratinly in place.
Again, thanks for your kind remarks. The pleasure is all mine, your well thought through arguments catalyze a lot of interesting discussions on this forum!
With your stance that social networking sites are a haven to safely leave our private information it seems you have more confidence in the self-corrective mechanisms of the market than I have. Granted, Facebook has taken legal action against third parties trying to steal user's information. I maintain however, that facebook's protection is not something to count on––our privacy is safe in their hands only seemingly.
By the way: the electronic frontier foundation is indeed concerned with privacy issues online...
What a better way to start than to say your posts have been the motivation for my posts. It's share joy going through them and to fathom the depths of your knowledge in the issues we've been discussing here at internet evolution.
As a reply to your post, i still want to re-iterate that these social networks should be seen to do more in thwarting spammers/hackers from getting our personal information from these sites. I agree with you that the end results of these sites is profit but even in a capitalist economy the consumer is of much importance as is the profit.
The site you mentioned is basically defending our freedom of speech on the internet and the point we are discussing here is about how we can halt this new trend of spammers getting our personal information from social networking sites. As Chris discuss in his post we do have a responsibility in this direction but i also feel the network themselves should do more. I mention the case where Facebook is taking a legal action against another website for doing this sort of thing we've been discussing. We should also know that these networks are also in competition to garner more users and if it becomes apparent to users that our personal information is not safe in a particular websites, then they would suffer a tremendius snub from users and in the process loose their popularity.
i think it's a little bit ironic that at first, people spend a lot of time,creating their profiles and posting their personal information and then they spend twice as much time, trying to destroy it:))))
I like reading your posts, even though I don't always agree with you. This time I partially support your ideas. I couldn't agree more with your statement that we, as users of social networking sites, have most responsibility over our identities in the end. My critique to your post logically follows out of this statement:
At the same time, you appeal to social networks to be more prudent with our personal information. I'm not sure if this is at all feasible, or even helpful in any way. You see, facebook and mySpace are privately owned commercial companies, and hence they are out for profit––not the general well-being of mankind. In the capitalist economy these companies function in, you can't expect them to unconditionally choose the side of their users. There are other organizations to protect us, such as the legal apparatus and non-profits like the electronic frontier foundation. To put it stronger: we shouldn't even want these companies to have too much responsibility over our 'privates.' As long as our protection coincides with their interest we're safe, but this is not something to take for granted. Or am I too pessimist now?
Yes, I started to respond to your question on my last article, but then my response started getting sort of long so I turned it into this article. I agree with you.
I think a good start would be for Myspace to not allow spock.com and other content aggregators to index it. It would take someone 5 seconds to do-- just edit the robots.txt file. I see they already block Alexa's spider...which is good: http://www.myspace.com/robots.txt.
It's the same principle that Google and Red Hat use: drive "abundance"
and help a select group of users find coherence and simplicity in the
midst of that abundance. (I wrote up a preliminary analysis here.)
Before you start conversing, you may require developing your online
profile page, depending on the networking site in theme or focus. Your
business networking profile (The Expert Network)
or profile page is vital when it comes to meeting other users for the
reason that, in the majority cases, Users are looking to communicate
with someone with identical goals, visions, beliefs, and interests as
they do. Without a personal profile, it would be hard or impracticable
to put in the picture what your interests are. That is why social
networking profiles are not only important, but they are considered
necessary.
Thanks for your post and even though you did not respond to my last comments, i felt your post has done just that. I do share your sentiment that we should start paying much attention to our online identity. In the end, we will have to bear the greatest responsibility if anything go wrong with our personal information online.
However, not all of us can be that prudent as you are presently 'scrubbing' yourself. This brings me to my point that the social networks themselves need serious the responsibility of protecting our information. I'm happy to read that Facebook took legal action in this direction: Facebook faces off against sex site. I believe such measures and others will compliment our efforts to thwart this new strategy by spammers. We know there is no perfect system and that there are vulnerabilities always, but the social networks should be seen to do more both technically and legally to lessen the potentila threat.
Funny comment--but like I said, I voluntarily post a lot of information on
the Web. If I had something I didn't want people to know about me, I
wouldn't post it online. For everything else I do, I sign my real name
and I don't worry about it. I use good spam filters and have that situation pretty much under control too.
What I do worry about, and why I'm now cleaning stuff up, is content
aggregators lumping together blog posts I've made with things other
people with my name have done or said and targetting me for spam based
on that.
Or,
if and when personalized spam (or "unsolicited
targetted marketing") takes hold, I don't want to get a reputation as
someone who loves jello and conspiracy theory books just because I
mentioned on myspace 6 years ago that I like the dead kennedys.
"The first step was to create a list of every Website where my profile was publicly available. After I got up to about 20, I started to get worried..."
Bit late for that, Sherlock.
Your spam-dismay is a bit like the whoremonger bemoaning the fact that he caught the clap.
In either case, it's a bit late in the day for "scrubbing." What you needed was one o' them StupidFilters ("prophylactics for mimetically transmitted diseases").
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To many of us who got our start working on the Web in the 1990s, the 2000s may have seemed like a letdown. We had dreams of a Semantic Web, the Dow at 8 million, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, groceries delivered to our doors at the click of a mouse, and retiring at 30.
Misuse of the Internet in the workplace can be a real problem. Besides the obvious loss of productivity that occurs when an employee is logged into Facebook or sending personal emails while on the clock, there are potential legal and security-related reasons why an employer might need or want to know exactly what an employee is doing on the Web while at work.
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A couple of weeks ago, in the first case to target the practice of a company posting fake positive reviews to the Internet -- or “astroturfing” -- Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, agreed to stop engaging in the practice and to pay $300,000 in penalties to the state of New York.
Smarter Collaboration: How to Thrive in a Challenging Business Environment Market conditions are changing faster than ever, and organizations need to improve their agility and adaptability in order to provide better service and improve processes. The ability to work with customers, business partners, and employees as effectively as possible - while at the same time holding down costs - is a key to success. READ THIS eBOOK
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In the final episode of this series about the death of Internet anonymity, Saunders describes how the Internet of the future will start to attain a level of intelligence that requires no human intervention. Scary.
Google's 'It Girl' talks about using personalized search to make sense of the mass of information on the Web – and how sometimes Google can appear to be semantically smarter than it really is.
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
Steve Saunders talks about the risks inherent in uncontrolled, widespread profiling of Internet users, and how one day this practice could form the basis of a new industry, the Outernet, which in economic terms will have outgrown the commercial value of the Internet itself.
Search companies and social networks are collecting incredibly detailed information about their users, says Steve Saunders, who predicts that these 'profiles' could one day become commodities to be bought and sold by companies on 'profile markets' or 'identity exchanges’ – the digital DNA equivalents of the financial and commodities exchanges on which stocks, oil, and gold are traded.
One of the most important Internet issues of all time is being ignored by the media. In this three-part video series Steve Saunders explains how search companies are turning the tables on their users by creating user profiles for financial gain, and how soon this trend will explode into full scale profiling.
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