Social Networking, Connectedness, and Privacy
CC licensed image via alancleaver on flickr.
Today I went to breakfast at Voula’s Offshore Cafe in the University District. I had the steak and eggs with rye toast for breakfast. It was quite tasty. But this isn’t about my breakfast so much as it’s about the interesting example of information leakage.
I use foursquare because it’s fun, and to find where my friends are going for food, activities, and other things. I don’t link my foursquare to any other accounts, but other people do. This morning at Voula’s, I checked in, and saw one other person there. I’m curious, and so I look at the foursquare profile. Turns out there’s a facebook link on the foursquare login, so I follow it. Turns out she was sitting at the table next to mine. I said hello and made a comment about foursquare. Then I returned to my meal.
Her facebook profile said a lot of things: that we have quite a few friends in common, who she’s seeking, and her full name. Now, I didn’t say anything to her about any of this, nor attempt to engage in a conversation at this time. It would have been weird and creepy. I didn’t want to be That Guy, or a weirdo. But it was very much an interesting lesson in how we chose to interact online can affect us in the offline world.
When we all got out to the car, I had a conversation with the teenagers about information that you share online, and used this very real example from just now to illustraite that what you do online can have real results in the rest of your life. Pay attention to what you post, to what you link, to all those things. It’s very easy to draw connections between people via the social graphs.
There are many wonderful things that I get out of connecting my social graphs. I get to point people whom I want to connect with me to where they can find me, and how they can do so. But it bears consideration before you blithely do so. Everything connected means there aren’t any secrets.
