Your virtual self is more public than your real self

Thanks to the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and thanks to Google’s content-searching methods, your virtual self is much more public than your real self. All it takes to be found in Cyberspace is a text search for your name. Employers can and do look up interviewees online, though some consider it to be unethical. Even blind dates aren't so blind any more, thanks to the net.

Social networking sites are growing in popularity. According to Business Week, last year 10 percent of all advertising impressions on the internet were being made on MySpace. Facebook has grown from its Stanford-students-only roots to rival MySpace for page hits. Barack Obama and John Edwards use Twitter to spread campaign news. Imeem is a music-sharing, video-sharing, and blogging site all wrapped into one.

All that traffic generates money, one way or another. MySpace and Facebook sell advertising. In order to contact someone directly on Match.com or LinkedIn, you must pay a monthly fee. That means these sites make money from offering direct access to people (you!). Some Facebook "widgets" - mini-games of sorts - make their money by collecting personal information about you. Before installing a widget on your page, you're always alerted to the fact and given a choice to opt out if you don't want to share your information with a company.

The default privacy settings on Facebook aren't great. Watch out! If you write on someone’s wall, think of it as a real wall in a public place – all his or her friends can see what you wrote. If the profile is public, anyone can see what you wrote.

The “news feed” application by default alerts your friends to all your Facebook activities. If you "friend" someone, join a new group, change your profile, take a quiz, or write on someone's wall, by the default settings, all your friends will know. It's easy to change that setting, thanks to the thousands of virtual protesters who told Facebook they wanted to be able to control what information about their own activities was shared with their friends.

Maintaining your privacy on these sites can be done, but it takes effort. You can’t control what information others post about you on the net, but you can control the information you post yourself.

After the Virginia Tech shootings last April, reporters used Facebook and MySpace to look up friends of the victims to find sources for their stories. In a Poynter article on journalists and Facebook, Dakarai Aarons wrote that students did not like that, and created their own Facebook groups in backlash. Other reporters have linked to a dead student's MySpace page, or reported about that page's content in trying to give a snapshot of the student's life.

The MySpace popularity contest can be a serious privacy concern. If 2,000 of your “friends” can see pictures of you drunk, or read your blog about how your friend slighted you last week, you cannot expect your privacy to be respected.

Everyone needs a good public face. LinkedIn is a professional networking site. Its relationships are built around office relationships—co-worker, manager, former manager, etc. LinkedIn’s popularity contest comes in the form of recommendations—if you enjoyed working with someone, you recommend them and maybe they’ll recommend you. It’s similar to posting quotes from references on a resume. This is how public profiles on social networking sites should be—an honest assertion of your strengths, not a rant.

Privacy is easy to maintain on any of these sites as long as you are aware of your public face. Be careful to examine all privacy settings. Know what to look for by looking at other people’s profiles. You can always change your settings later. Make sure your friends are really your friends, say nothing you wouldn’t be proud of, and if you're going to post a picture you don't want to see in your obituary, post it under a pseudonym.