Inevitably almost every day I’ve been browsing through various blogs I have come across at least one entry touting the effects of social networking sites in driving traffic to a person’s blog. The two most popular are of course Myspace and Facebook. The marketing power of those two sites alone is nearly unimaginable. Then we have smaller, slightly less well known sites such as Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us, and Digg all of which are social book marking sites. When you put all of these sites together they allow one to perform a marketing blitz of megalithic proportions.

This ability for extreme marketing is unfortunately not without risks. Social networks thrive by allowing people to interact at a very personal (if such a thing is possible) level with one another. Often times very personal, and very private information is aired for the world to see on a person’s profile page. I believe this boldness is due in part to wanting to be part of the social network, but more because of the misguided belief that we have some form of anonymity on the internet. Before we go any further let’s be very clear about this, online you have no anonymity. Everything you do can be traced back to you if need be. Most of the time there is no need, but there are many and varied means of doing so.

I’ll use myself as an example. When I first started using the world wide web I was a member of a discussion forum. Part of the registration process for that forum was to put your physical address and of course an email address. I didn’t know at the time that using my real address might not be such a great idea so I did. Besides I figured by hiding it that meant no one could find it. Which of course is dead wrong. All anyone had to do was wait until my profile was indexed and then after that if you typed in my email address you would pull up my full name, date of birth, and physical address. No one ever bothered me but to this day if I type in that old email address I still can pull up that information. Unfortunately the site has since gone under and I’ve never had any luck getting the web archives to delete it. It has really served as a lesson to be very careful with what information I share about myself online.

Social networking sites are even worse as they actively encourage you to be as open and forthwith as possible with the community. That’s fine, but always take into account who might be getting a hold of that information and what they might do with it. Almost everyone I meet I go and do a search for them on various sites, and most of the time I find something. A lot are private so beyond a picture and a screen name I see nothing, but a few are very explicit in their details. Addresses, phone numbers, husbands, wives, children’s names, birth dates, names of pets, churches they attend, where they went to college, when they graduated, who they dated before they were married, where their last vacation was taken. A lot of what I believe most people would consider very personal information. All of which could lead to anything from identity theft to a ranting raving psychotic monster showing up at your door.

This isn’t to encourage you to stop using social networking sites, but it is to encourage you to be careful about the information you make available to the public. A good rule of thumb is to assume that even if set to private anyone and everyone will be able to see that information.

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