The Internet and the Death of Privacy

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by SecretAgentMa'am

I'm completely baffled by the whole concept of people feeling "unsafe" because they know someone looked at their public profile. If you're worried about a stalker, would you prefer that they be able to closely monitor your profile in complete anonymity? I suppose some people just can't stand not having some drama going on all the time.

I recently deleted my Facebook account because I was no longer willing to deal with their privacy issues. I read a few articles about the new profile pages they're rolling out soon, and I decided to jump ship before that happened. If anyone isn't aware, Facebook is about to start encouraging users to enter their medical histories (and will be using your status updates to update your profile information as well), which FB will then sell, mostly to insurance companies. If someone is making a lot of money running a website that you're using for free, it's because you're the product, not the consumer. I've switched over to Google+, which certainly isn't perfect but is light years better than FB.

If you Google my legal name, all you'll find is some really bad Forever Knight fanfiction I wrote when I was a teenager. I haven't used my legal name for anything but work, school, banking, and the DMV for at least 15 years. If you know the name I use online, you can find a bit of information about me, but nothing damning.

True about being able to see who might be "stalking." And profiles here don't have to have much of anything on them, anyway.

I have been thinking about the fact that I have different names on all kinds of stuff and that all of my "creds" and professional licenses except for one, are under names that unless someone has known me for a zillion years or is related to me would have no idea of. For a long time, this bugged me because of the whole thing of having changed names in relationship to "other," or as "pen" now, I think it is a good thing. Who would have guessed? At one time, I wanted to change everything to one name. Forget it!

I keep thinking about FB- I like it a lot and it has enabled me to stay in touch well with many, but so many people that are tech-savvy (I'm not) have pointed out many things that concern me. We have to take the bad with the good with social network websites, but it helps to have some knowledge (even as a tech-moron) for decidion making about using them. After learning about some of the spyware that my niece is now aquainted with and her going through what is possible to find out about people online, I developed a whole new sense about this stuff and with her help, am making changes. Helps that most of my working career was working for myself after the early years and I established my own "benefits."