Netizens
The subject of this post comes from some of the things I’ve read and thought about for the last few days, and I thought it would be interesting to share these thoughts.
Yesterday, I discovered fortuitous. It’s a blog all about doing business online, but some of the ideas can also be used in a personal context. The post I’m referring to is the one about living with web applications. It probably struck a chord with me because I’ve actually been heeding some of the advice given for a couple of months now.
I’m one of the Internet generation. I grew up when the Internet was growing up, and I’ve been fortunate to witness many of the highs and lows of the Internet throughout the years. I’ve also been an avid user ever since I persuaded my parents to get our first dial-up connection sometime in the last millennium.
So, a month ago, I started wondering why more of my information wasn’t actually online. Until recently, I downloaded my email using POP, held an offline calendar in Outlook, had a custom-made online to-do list and a browser add-on for viewing feeds. I decided to finally embrace the Internet completely and move some of my life onto it.
I started looking around for somewhere that could store all this information, and pretty quickly decided that the only reliable places would be one of the two giants in the computing field: Microsoft and Google. I could use Windows Live, but many of the features are just being revealed and need invitations. Therefore, I decided to use Google, although I’d love to test out Live in the future.
I already had a Gmail account set up a long time ago, but I never used it and now it was just accumulating junk mail. I decided to solve all my problems in one fell swoop, so I logged into Google and set up my personalised homepage. I also set up Gmail to catch spam better and redirected all of my email accounts to it. At the same time, I also imported all of my previous mail, deleting a lot of it in the process. After that, I set up Google Reader and imported all my RSS feeds into it.
So there it was; all my life moved onto the Internet in only a few minutes!
Now most of what I’ve written about so far in this article is private data; nobody except me has access to my email or feeds. However, I also have accounts with some popular social networking sites, and it’s only after I read a great article in PCW magazine that I realised just how much personal information I was sharing with the world. I was amazed that I was keeping feeds, which are not so private, completely off limits on my machine, and then revealing my date of birth, residence and mobile phone numbers on a social networking site to millions of users.
I decided that I had to crack down on this, because it would only be a matter of time before someone used my own information against me. Facebook is the site I use the most, so I logged into that first and made most of my profile available onto to my friends. I also got rid of my mobile number, since those who need to know it already do. I’ve decided that I’m going to take the same course of action on some other sites.
The moral of the story? You might think you’re being smart on the Internet, but you might not know what you’re actually giving away. Get your priorities right and you can use the Internet to your advantage; get them wrong and you’ll be telling people just what they shouldn’t know.