Gun owners in New York State recently freaked when a local newspaper published their names and addresses online. It’s all public information, the paper declared. But never before had the data been made so available, critics replied. Perhaps the paper had made public information too public?
Which brings us to Facebook and its fun, fascinating, and worrisome new search service. Currently available only to a relative handful of Facebook’s billion registered users, the new service lets you quickly find out quite a bit about your Facebook friends, or complete strangers. It’s stuff you could find already, with diligent research, but soon it will take a few keystrokes, not unlike how the New York newspaper made the names of gun owners so easily available.
Comments
Listen, with Linked In, Facebook, Google, Yahoo Groups and a zillion forums and other places where you can spill the beans about yourself, most on-line people are going to have to face the fact that anything that they write can come back and bit them. That's the down side; the good side(s)exist as well.
Hiawatha... no disrespect meant, but your scarey analysis of that Fudderberger's effort to take over the world does not include any info on what happens if one does not use any of the facebook, about face, or other "social media" . In other words, is just using Google as a research tool mean that everybody is going to have personal info available to every snotnosed little twerp or twerpette that got a computer for Christmas at age 5?