Every mouse click and key stroke we input online is recorded. Whether it's used for good by Web sites creating metrics, or used for bad by a criminal cyberstalking us, the fact remains, we cannot hide our actions within the digital universe. What's scarier though, is what personal information regarding our non-digital lives can be easily found online.
Recently, I was reading an article in the technology magazine "WIRED" about a contest they held. One of their writers shed his old identity and created a whole new one and readers had 30 days to try and find him. The person who did would win $3,000. The writer went 27 days before a group of readers was able to track down his exact location in the U.S. using his postings online.
This got me thinking. How protected is our information online?
The answer, of course, is that our information online isn't protected at all. The sad part is that most of it we do to ourselves. We post addresses and phone numbers on social networking sites and don't think another thing of it. A little scary, though, is the information other people post about us. It could be achievements in school that wind up in newsletters, or mentions of our lives in blogs by our family or friends.
I didn't just stumble upon this knowledge; I gained it doing a little social experiment. Over Thanksgiving Break, I was spending time with an old friend of mine who introduced me to Mystery Google. Mystery Google is similar to Google except when you search for something, you don't receive the results for your search, you receive the results from the person who searched right before you.
Now this may seem completely pointless, and for the most part it is, but something interesting has started out of it. People will post their phone number and ask other people to call or text it something. This could be a secret or their favorite song or how old they are. It's a variation of a chat room. You make contact with complete strangers who have a similar interest in something as you.
Wanting to see how much information I could find out about someone by just having their name and phone number, information that can be found on a business card or in the phone book, I posted on Mystery Google "Text me your name to ###-###-#### and be surprised about how much I can find out about you in 10 minutes."
A few minutes later, a text came in with a name. My friend and I used Google and scoured through random Web sites to find out as much as we could about this person. By the end of the 10 minutes, we had found out this person's gender, age, height, shoe size, a picture, birthplace, current town of residence, the last school attended, class rank upon graduating, the person's parents were divorced, the city the father currently lived in, the person had siblings and the person's favorite sport, soda and band.
I relayed this information to them and received a text back from a very concerned person. Every piece of information we had found about them was correct.
It doesn't work like this all the time though. We were unable to find information on a few of the people who texted us, either because there were too many people with that same name living in the same area code or because that person didn't have much of a presence online. However, if we had one more piece of information, say a birth date or employer, then we could've found the same amount of information.
The reason we should be concerned about this is because complete strangers can take a small amount of information about us and find out more than we ever intended. In this day and age of crime, it isn't unheard of for people to stalk one another. It becomes much easier when a victim essentially has their entire life online.
Another reason for concern is the amount of information a potential employer could find out about you. Many employers say that they do search for potential employees on Google to find out additional information about them that isn't listed on the résumé or application. I'm sure those employers would be extremely impressed about your ability to balance when they find that picture of you doing a keg stand.
We are a digital generation. We live our lives online. The worst thing that can happen there is a virus or anonymous slur against us. But the second we start to post every detail of our non-digital lives online, we set ourselves up for much bigger problems. Just be careful what information can be found about you by complete strangers.
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