Do We Really Care About How Private Our Lives Are?

We bemoan the loss of our privacy, and yet a growing number of us continue to invite thousands of strangers into our personal lives every day. We share our innermost thoughts, show our caught-on-tape videos and photos, and issue minute-by-minute updates on our private lives to the whole world. Can we really be that concerned with our privacy or are we just fooling ourselves?

The growth and phenomenal popularity of social networking in recent years has made many of us lay out our personal lives to public scrutiny. According to a news release published March 9, 2009, Nielson Online reports that blogging and social networking is the 4th most popular online activity, ahead of e-mail. 10% of all internet time is spent on these sites by 67% of all online users worldwide. That is a lot of people going through our stuff.

Online diaries or blogs have been around for years, but the proliferation of personal blogs started in 1999 with the advent of blog hosting services and blog tools such as LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress making it easier for us to set up our own website and take the whole online community into our confidence. We set up profiles with our personal information and talk about our private lives and secret thoughts. With the continuing development of blog tools and apps, we make it even easier for people to track us and our activities with RSS feeds and assorted online tools. Then we solicit and even welcome comments from friends and strangers. We trust everyone.

Classmates.com, founded in 1995, was the first social networking site as we know it today. It was followed by others including Friendster (2002), My Space (2003), and Facebook (2004). The original premise was to reconnect with lost friends, but social networking sites have expanded as a venue for us to share all sorts of personal information, and not only reconnect with old friends, but meet and make new acquaintances. Twitter (2006), the latest entry into social networking, is based on being short and sweet and makes it even easier to keep the entire online world updated on our every move, thought, and idea.

According to a study for January 2009 done by Compete.com, Facebook is ranked #1 with over 1 million monthly visitors, followed by MySpace with over 800 thousand visitors, and Twitter with over 54 thousand visitors. We are opening our personal lives to a whole lot of public scrutiny.

Some of us are a little more discerning with who sees our information and we restrict access to those we trust. But according to a Webroot survey of over 1100 users of social networking sites, a majority of us are making our private information public. From a report published on June 24, 2009:

- 80 percent allow at least part of their profiles to be searchable through Google or other public search engines; 66 percent don't restrict any profile information from being visible through public search.

- Over half (59 percent) of respondents aren't sure who can see their profile.

- Over one quarter (28 percent) accept friend requests from strangers; of those, one third (36 percent) do not cloak any of their profile information.

- About one third (32 percent) include at least three pieces of identifiable information.

Many of us delight in Googling our blogs or web content and even our real names to see how high we rank, but we aren't so cautious about what those search engines are ultimately revealing to everyone, because we link profiles with personal information to our web content. We are leaving our virtual front doors unlocked to anyone who wants to come in and nose around.

We express trepidation with supplying personal info to join and register for various online groups and websites, but all reputable websites have privacy policies. The majority of them state that your personal information is used for their own purposes and communication and demographic purposes and will not be shared with or sold to third parties. We have the option to choose what information is make public through our profiles, but many of us tell all, even if it is inadvertent. Unfortunately, ignorance is no excuse for our own irresponsibilty.

The internet has made a wealth of information and resources available at our fingertips. What would... did... we do without it? Social networking is a useful and fun resource, but we must assume some responsibilty in preventing a positive experience from turning into a nightmare capable of wreaking havoc on our lives. Like the 'real' world, there are snoops and criminals who will take advantage of front doors we leave open. It is our responsibilty to 'lock' them if we don't want someone coming in uninvited.

References:

Nielson Online Study (pdf)
A Brief History of Social Networking Sites
Compete.com (social network stats - Jan. 2009)