Team A'Hearn

Wired.com had a good article (?!) the other day about the evolving behaviors of people online, specifically with respect to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Match, and the like. There are some great issues to consider here, especially for those of us who spend ridiculous amounts of our lives online in some capacity: how and why have we gone from being nearly rabid with online privacy, only to expose so much of ourselves to an online network? Granted, there’s a big difference between my social security number and the last book I read, but not everyone has such a “meticulously managed profile” and may easily go public with some unintended snippet of highly personal information. This then leads to the issue of how one presents themselves to a social network, or online at all. A great deal has been written about thinking twice before posting that awesome photo of last month’s New Year’s Eve party, liquored up and sitting in the back of a squad car; but let me stress this – regardless of how popular a site is now, the Internet is merciless and the Internet is forever. Recruiters, managers, friends, or family can all stumble upon publicly available content, and the reaction might not be a high-five.

Now I’m not joining the tin-foil hat club here, but as someone with way too much of himself online I can promise that most, if not all of these more popular sites have very good privacy and viewable-content-limiting capabilities. Lock yourself down, and if there’s any doubt at all, just don’t even post it.