This is not a dress. This is a sacred robe of the ancient psychedelic monks

I have been watching all this talk of digital litter and the developing issue of digital snooping quite closely. I am quite well spread out over the internet and have no problem with friends and strangers viewing my profile, my pictures or my blog (my blog on myspace - no one I know knows about this lj, I dont think - but that is the point). The problem I have is being snooped on by employers or recruitment agencies or receiving targeted spam. About a month ago I read an interview with a recruitment consultant who said he regularly viewed peoples facebook profile to see what they were 'really' like. This threw me a bit because it means that either this consultant has asked and been accepted as the potential employees friend, or the potential employee has allowed open access to people in the same network/s as them, or the recruiter has some kind of backdoor access to peoples facebook profile.

It is that last option that worries me. If everyone played by the rules then I would have complete faith that I could control my own publicly accessible profile using the privacy settings of each technology, but they often don't. I do not allow people from my network to see my profile, I do not allow strangers see my myspace profile either but does that really count for much?

I am worried that someone is going to develop a tool that will exploit any or all of these networking sites. They are a veritable gold mine for marketers and fraudsters (not that the two are any different) and being able to data mine the information would be priceless as it is constantly getting more and more popular and more and more specific. In the end, if someone were to create a backdoor on these technologies so your information posted to myspace/facebook/ljournal/flikr/amazon/wherever could be correlated and sold I would feel extremely exploited and it gives me an uneasiness using these products now, even though they may never be broken. It is like writing a diary with photograph evidence that you think your grandmother is going to read.

Another reason for concern is how little we know about the internet. What will happen to our defunct facebook profiles when we stop using the sites. Will they really be wiped? I doubt it, there is no need to wipe anything anymore. We will never run out of space and the data is worth something to someone. Does a privacy policy mean anything for a company that has stopped trading? Are pictures of me pilled off my nut going to be indexed on the web somewhere when I am 10years older? Murdoch owns myspace for fucks sake, that is reason enough to cancel my account.

Here is the article that got me thinking about this today - http://news.com.com/At+Rapleaf%2C+your+personals+are+public/2100-1038_3-6205716.html?tag=news.2