Okay, so it’s old news but you can check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbifTbJtgJA.

Seeing world leaders’ little indiscretions caught on tape for the world to see reminded me of a good friend of mine doing a (impromptu and with only a little egging on by the compere) funky dance right out of an American Pie kinda movie on stage at an Interact function many years ago. No cameras (in phones or otherwise) to record this strange occurence or the shocked fascination of the crowd; just human memory in all its fallibility to carry those images for posterity, to be brought up at get-togethers and laughed about.

Nowadays, you can bet that any incident of that nature will be recorded and found on a social network. With any luck, the poor soul will end up tagged and watched by millions of people who never knew he existed until they saw the video.

This simply means that today, we need to be far more careful about what we say and do; especially the moments of spontaneous craziness (see the part about the Star Wars Kid in the article at Scientific American on social networks and privacy).

This point was driven home extra hard when I took part in a training recently. When the guy doing the training pointed out that my Outlook calendar was easily visible to my superiors at office – something that I understood was possible, but something that I never really thought about. I got a little bothered about this and asked him “Where’s the privacy in that?”

The response was simple – “What privacy? Your system adminstrators have full access to the information on your computer – you just need to make sure that you don’t do anything unnecessary with it.”

And then it struck me – all those personal details on Facebook? All those emails in my “personal” mailboxes hosted by big “free email” companies? Just how private are those emails? Or my events in Google Calendar?

The main argument presented in this case is that “Good people have nothing to hide”. But what if I’m just a private person? Okay, not so private that I blog under my real name, but private in the sense that I like having control of how much information about myself is revealed?

There are so many facebook photos that get saved on to folders and forwarded via email that you might wonder if being in touch is worth the price. It just means that you have to be careful about what the world sees. What used to be the private pain of celebrities the world over has now become a far more common problem. Sure, you can try and sue the moron from the photo studio who decided to share all those interesting photos of your girlfriends off your digital camera with his friends, but how do you intend on proving it?

It seems that privacy as we used to know it died quite sometime ago, around the same time that it became possible to fish out old “personal” emails and forward them to people who weren’t in the loop. All that can be done now is to watch your step – and hope that if anything about you is on the net, you know about it.

I was recently reading about the furor about Facebook’s new Terms of Service and its subsequent repeal.

All this made me a little worried about what happens to my content, until I remembered that being slightly paranoid pays off.

Not being the most social of people, I stayed out of the Hi5 and MySpace networks for quite some time. Soon after, I began to realise that I was losing touch with some of my good friends, so much so that I’d be sure to drop a brick on the conversation once if ever one happened.

The result of this was my foray into social networking via Facebook. Its initial attempts to scan my email accounts for potential friends bothered me no end. How could I be sure that they wouldn’t just steal my details and use them for some nefarious activity?

My fears are hardly unfounded, but as can be seen from the power of the community that has been built in Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg will have a hard time doing anything that can be construed as “evil”.

That said, it’s still a good idea to ensure that you upload nothing on the net that you wouldn’t want other people to see. Once it’s on the net you have no control over what’ll happen to it.

As a result, I’m a very boring member of Facebook. I don’t add applications that let me do weird things to my friends and I don’t upload crazy photographs. But it still lets me keep in touch, which is what matters. The only photos I do upload are the ones I don’t mind sharing.

Applications on Facebook are yet another concern for me. Their need to access my information is a little scary, given my nature. But it turns out that applications are not the only possible culprits in data theft as can be seen in this article on Yahoo.

Going Phishing

Furthermore, I found the following email in my inbox recently:

While the subject immediately gave it away as spam, you’ve got to give the creator some credit for making it look like something legit straight out of MSN. Had you been a regular newsletter subscriber and thought this was something you accidentally subscribed to, any attempt to unsubscribe would lead to a chinese url, as seen at the bottom left.

This isn’t the only method currently being employed, as can be seen from various users’ experiences when you do a flickr search as below:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=phishing&m=text

With such attempts at data theft and scamming getting more numerous by the day, it’s up to all of us to be more careful when on the net.