Virtual Privacy

Apropos of my earlier post on grads' online presence, there is an article in today's New York Times about students and recent grads finding that their web activity is being scrutinized. Employers are surfing the web and finding the Xanga, Livejournal, and MySpace sites where their applicants have often posted, let us say, questionable material about themselves. Even Facebook, which is accessible only to those with university email addresses, is being scrutinized using other students or recent grads who still have access to a university account. This is certainly true of UPS grads, whose email addresses convert to an "alum" account that retains an .edu domain, and so can continue to access ostensibly student-only sites. I recall the looks on my students' faces in one class where I mentioned that I had been looking at their Facebook pages.

What's the lesson of this?

• Secure any pages or sites that you don't want to share openly to make it more difficult to find. For example, blogs can be kept off of search engines.
  
• Remember that any time you link out to another website, traffic from your site to that other URL will leave a record at the other end. So if you think your posts are private, but in the process link to an external site, the owner of that site can see where visitors have come from and work their way backward. Similarly, others may link to your site without asking permission, effectively advertising what had been a private site.
  
• Remember that if you have a "handle" or nickname that you commonly use on the web, it is much easier to track your activities across a range of sites. Often these nicknames are part of an email address, making it even easier to match up information across discussion threads, websites, and other online activity.
  
• Assume that nothing on the web is private. Ask yourself whether anything you have posted is something you'll be asked to account for later. If it is, take it down.
• Google yourself regularly to see what can be found by using different key words. I found, for example, that there's now a blog called "Patrick O'Neil's Pointed Pen" which is all about politics and has nothing to do with me. Sooner or later, though, someone will assume I'm the author.