Balance Them!
OK, I know. I’m spitting in the cyber wind again.
But I refuse to accept the premise that privacy no longer matters.
Or even that privacy is more public than it used to be.
Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.
Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.
[…]
In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.
You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.
[…]
His advice: “When you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.”
Source: New York Times
You really should read the parts I left out.