Social-Networking Ourselves to Jail

The easiest way to expose your deepest secrets is to post it on facebook – and it happens everyday. I’m not just talking about that embarrassing weakness for romantic comedies that you can’t help but list in your interests. Time after time, stories emerge of extramarital affairs, a stripping job one had 10 years ago, and transsexual operations that become exposed on social-networking sites. Most of the time it’s our fault for telling the world via computer and internet. So what is it about mediated communication that allows us to open in ways we wouldn’t dare word of mouth?

Even criminal investigations have been cracked wide open because of admittance to crimes on status updates. An article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation uncovered ways the government is tracking people online. One way comes from the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security, which use social networking sites to investigate citizen petitions. Someone might lie about being married in order to gain citizenship, but would tell a complete stranger on facebook the truth. A 2008 memo from FDNS explained, “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages and many of these people accept cyberfriends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.”

A story in Reuters today announced that Microsoft and Facebook are teaming up to provide Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, with “likes” from facebook users to tailor search results to individual users. On the surface this seems harmless, but digging deeper we must realize that social-networking sites OWN our information that we give them.

So what can we do - delete Facebook from our lives? I’m not suggesting that exactly. Social-networking is still a great way to keep in touch with friends that have moved away, or you don’t see often – all the reasons that made it so attractive to begin with. I want raise public awareness that these situations are real. Your personal information is the most valuable possession you have. A possession that can be easily compromised from the mysterious friend request of John Smith from nowhere Kansas (otherwise known as Uncle Sam).