Kit's Blog

The Internet is for revealing all your secrets?

     So I write quite often about how blogging should be about things besides yourself, and the main reason I said it was because you’re boring. Now, though that is my honest opinion, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other reasons. Unsurprisingly, one of those reasons is coming clear now, and is one of the reasons I’m so paranoid with all of my "personal" information. Sure, it’s not very difficult to find my name, address, or phone number if you take a look around the internet, but this isn’t what I mean by "personal" information. What I mean by personal information is that I don’t have pictures of my friends with their full names next to it. I don’t have pictures of myself in revealing positions. I don’t talk about doing illegal things. I don’t reveal things that would damage my reputation in the work world.
     Okay, that's not entirely true. I'm sure that if I ever decided to work for Microsoft or Google there would be considerable issues with the information on my blog. But in the larger sense, outside of companies that I have directly noted, I would more than likely not have any issues if someone "found" my website. Many people now days have facebook and myspace accounts and post their preferences in music, porn, alcohol, sex, cigarettes, and work. And many of those people post their preferences in things like alcohol and cigarettes while they're still in high school. Now, this normally doesn't mean a whole lot because most parents and teachers (at the hig school level) aren't exactly capable of making it into these more "private" areas, as was the intention of facebook and myspace, but this doesn't mean that people with more skills can't make it. And it's becoming more and more evident that it doesn't take so much skill, as much as resource. "Even though companies are loath to admit it publicly, researching candidates on social networks is becoming easy and prevalent as entering their names into Google" (1). There is no real privacy on the internet unless you're truly experienced in getting on and covering your tracks. Almost everything about the internet is all about making sure that if need be, traceable. The only things that really go against this are IRC channels, and even then an administrator could conceivably go back and look through logs to find who did what, but it's not often that IRC admins are up to it.
     Thus I implore you, don't be an idiot. The internet is all public domain, and even more than that, you'll find that most of what you say is logged by someone, somewhere. If not the obvious places like the Internet Archive then on someone's computer who thought it funny. Either way watch what you say. You never know who's looking on.

Works Cited (MLA Format)
Sone, Brad and McCauley, Lauren. "Put Your Best Face Forward." Newsweek: How to Get Into College, 2007: 56-60.