As my Social Media savvy improves, I have slowly started accepting the fact that not everything is rosy on this front. The Internet is big! Bigger than any other organized or non-organized enterprise! You can never really quantify how big something may get on the Internet. You have instant millionaires and billionaires! You have viral videos that make celebrities out of people who under normal circumstances would have been considered not so funny. Double rainbow guy, with 33 million views, comes to mind.

With 2.2 billion users, the potential of the Internet is huge. Unfortunately, the potential is huge for criminal enterprises as well. Privacy is a thing of the past; or, it seems to be headed that way. Gone are the days of worrying about the store clerk having access to your credit card information. When high-tech criminals steal, they steal big; in thousands, if not in millions.

The recent security breach at Global Payments, where over a million credit cards were compromised is a good example. You may be careful about your public profile. However “friends”, “connections” and “followers” may inadvertently tag you or post information regarding you and your location. Try typing in the name of a friend, or a relative, living in the United States, into the search box of one of the sites shown, and see the results.

http://www.spokeo.com/

http://pipl.com/

These are legitimate “people finder” sites. However, when they show you a Google Map view of the person’s house, name, and age of their relatives, and offer to tell you the value of their house, for a price, it starts getting creepy! The sense of discomfort that people feel when they see their publicly available information has spawned another set of “services.”

The likes of http://www.reputation.com/ and http://pleaserobme.com/ help you become aware of the pitfalls of over-sharing and “clean up” your online act. This often involves providing them with more information to get rid of existing information.

Sounds fishy? I will let you be the judge.

Have a good week!

Source: The dark side of Social Media with Robert Tercek, Gregory Markel & Marc Goodman