Worried about privacy in Social networks? Shutup!
I am getting tired of all the talk regarding privacy issues within social networks such as Orkut and Friendster or even LinkedIn. What’s the big deal, leakage of your email address or people finding out where you work? Who cares?
All of this information is already on the net. If I really want to know your email address I will go search on Google or perform a whois lookup. If you are really security conscience, I will do a lookup on one of the PGP key repositories.
These are communities and the only thing that is available is what you provide it. In many ways Orkut is similar to newsgroups. If you don’t want to people to know your email address, use another one especially for Orkut. How about orkut@mydomain.com? If you are really paranoid about people knowing things about you, don’t join a social network. You can’t be an anti-social socialite, it just doesn’t work.
If you don’t want people to know who you work for then don’t provide the site with your employer’s information.
The same people complaining about leakage of their personal information have their contact information splattered across their homepage/online journal/blog. So relax and take a hard thought about what you consider private. Spammers have your email address, why not friends?
February 18th, 2004 at 10:25 pm
I uh.. found your blog via Orkut. And of course, blogs are never meant to be private - so it looks like Orkut is doing its job very well in spreading the pollen.
I think the bigger concern in terms of privacy is not email addresses, phone numbers, etc. It is the information we provide about the movies we like, the books we enjoyed, the food preferred - that sort of thing. All this is simply good fodder for marketeers. Targeted marketing already happens today. Spam is a clumsy attempt (brute force method) to implement. Ideally for effective selling - you’d receive unsolicited mail about perhaps.. boxing events and golf tournaments. Free tickets to see Seinfeld on the set?
Your orkut info (and really any personal info provided at your blog and elsewhere) does telemarketers jobs for them. Maybe now they’ll stop calling our homes for surveys and instead use orkut to mine our preferences
Incidentally I added you to my orkut network. Don’t feel obligated to add me back. Am just trolling for interesting ppl to read. You made the list - rock on.
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