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This has been a subject I have always wanted to vomit about, but I never seem to have the time or energy to sit down and abuse the keyboard, most likely because the very subject I am talking about usually dominates all the free hours I have when I am bored or just chillaxing at home.

Since the boom of social networking somewhere around 1995 when the concept was exposed to a wider volume of internet users we now are beyond the point of no return where an individual in the “western world” cannot completely feel at ease be it socially or professionally without having some form of ‘user profile’ published somewhere on the internet where it is open to be viewed by anybody in the world.

My own generation now known as the “facebook babies” have all experienced life before social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Wayne etc, yet now the majority of these “facebook babies” would find it hard to keep their social ‘status’ without the use of such websites and networks, which I think is somewhat concerning in so many ways that I am a little surprised it’s not written or talked about as much as I feel it should be.

So to lay down the facts and to get straight to the point of what I am writing about, lets take a look at what YOU, yes you publish about yourself on the internet at some point or another, maybe not on one particular website or social networking utility (maybe several) and see how much personal information we actually make public to anybody who can read or hear, and what I think is quiet scary at the least, to anybody with any agenda or mental state.

We publish:

• Our favourite movies
• Our Address
• Our favourite books
• Our favourite Music
• Our home town
• Our Phone number
• Our email addresses
• Our club memberships
• Our jobs
• Our Education History
• Our Dates of birth
• Our Sexual Orientation
• Our Interests
• Our Daily Schedules
• Our Relations to friends
• Our pictures and photographs
• Our Personal Videos
• Our Political Affiliations
• What we are doing at any time during the day.

Now the only way I can attempt to make you see what I am seeing here, is to ask you to take a second and do the following,

Remember any movie or TV programme that was either based upon a character that was working for a government department, such as the police, the security services such as MI5/6, FBI, CIA, FSB, GIA, NSA etc.

The plot is to track down a criminal, to find out as much information about that person as possible to help solve the problem, now the way to get this information about the bad guy/girl is to look on a DATABASE. Usually a government database such as criminal records, intelligence databases etc, and we always star in amazement when we watch the scene on the television when the good guys type in this person’s name, and BOOM! Like magic, everything about the bad person appears on their database. Their eye colour, height, allergies, professions, financial status, friends, photos, videos, actually everything I have bulleted above!………. Now are you seeing my point?

It was, at one point a fountain of information held on individuals that could only be accessed by people that were doing it for the “right reasons”, to protect and to serve their community, such delicate information that only people in high positions could only access because it was so personal. Only now we don’t need these databases to be so protected and treated as delicate and respected the privacy of the person this information was about, because we volunteer this information to anybody who wants to read it.

All in the name of social networking?

People bang on about Facebook’s privacy policy which states that once we upload any information about ourselves we no longer have the right to revoke that information submitted and we automatically grant facebook the exclusive rights to use that information for any purposes they deem fit, oh including using your photographs without your permission too. But what these people blissfully ignore is that this information cannot be treated with such delicate hands because the users give too much personal information away on purpose, and for the purpose of making it public (that could be public to the entire world, or to other user accounts/people that person has granted permission to view their own profiles).

So that big secret database we all get paranoid about when we think about it, that database that when we think about the information other people have on us makes the hairs on our arm stand on end, isn’t as top secret as we all thought, and why?

Because we knowingly upload all this information about ourselves into the public domain.

Could this be because we are all widely exposed to a celebrity obsessed world that we are now comfortable with sharing our personal lives with the rest of the world like these so called “celebrities” do on reality TV?

Maybe we’re all just getting too comfortable, something for you to think about. (And me too!).

So really, our governments don’t need to have an extensive secret network of databases on every single citizen, because now, they have facebook!

Over & Out