Your information, Your responsibility

I saw this article on Fast Company when I was researching my post on Cloud Computing. It is yet another warning about privacy issues and the internet. This one focuses on Google Profiles. I must say, I got a little, um, irked. Of course, Google and tons of other internet-based services can fling my information far and wide. Isn’t that the point of the internet? But isn’t it my responsibility to make sure that the information I supply, wherever I supply it is information I’m willing to have made public? As the article says, “Who hasn’t Googled someone…?” Well if you have Googled someone else, then you can bet your boots that someone else has Googled you.

I believe we need to take responsibility for our information and for how it is used. Google has a great little tool called Alerts that allows you to receive an email whenever information on certain topics is crawled by the Google spiders. I have alerts set up for every form of my name (first and last, first, middle initial, last, etc) so that I am alerted whenever something hits and I can monitor it. Yes, there are several other Sandra Pearson’s out there but it doesn’t take much to scan and make sure that if it’s me, it’s accurate. And if it’s not, then I do something about it if necessary. Just like I would in the “real” world.

The moral of the story: Don’t put anything out there that you don’t expect someone else to see unless you are ok with them seeing it. Period.

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