After reading a rather interesting article about the fears of online stalkers I felt it was important to raise the issue further. People tend to forget about how the tangled wires of the interweb can become an advantage to anybody, in which your every moves can be monitored. The main artillery in a cyberstalkers box of tricks is a little thing known as the Search Engine. Google and the other giants of search tend to do a little thing known as indexing and caching, now I’m not going to be condescending and inform you of how Google and the Google bots work but its vital to understand that your actions are constantly being stored. Search engines do a very good job of removing the tangles of the web, to leave stepping stones between each site on information about YOU. Information including name, email address, phone number, or where you work etc. Now having this information freely available isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the importance should be emphasized on you knowing that this information is available and you are the person who would be constantly adding to it.
A good example is Hot or Not and Google maps somebody had created a small web application that allows you to search by post code (or close to it) to find people registered on Hot or Not then displays their profile together with photo’s etc. Now this sort of thing could be created from any site you supply a post code too, which I find a little scary because then it becomes very personal which could be a big danger to society members like women. Although things like this I see as an extension to the phonebook, its getting the balance just right. Nobody has full control over the web, so be careful.
Furthermore I fear for the youth culture of today, in the future when applying for jobs a big long trail will be left of your Friday night shanigans or a comment on a site that may not be appropriate. All an employer would have to do is perform a ’search’ and the results would be displayed. I wouldn’t be surprised in the none to distant future to find organisations in which other org’s employ to ’dig up dirt’ about prospectus employees. The Internet gives you the interactive user freeness, in which views and actions can be expressed. Now I am not judging these actions but what is imperative to this argument is that these views you reflect are in line with any future job roles you take, unlike some young lib dem eh. A good article about this can be read here
Although if you have a name like Michael Smith you can fuck about all you want, there is just too many of the little critters !!.
-Kyle