Ok first a disclaimer, I dont hate Google, infact I love it, tomorrow if they offer me a job I would love to work with them, I am not even trying to be the conscience of the company, but isn't this Buzz thing getting too far? Aren't we risking too much just for a little more information fun? Let me begin by the way buzz came into my life, I woke up yesterday morning and I see my Gmail is offering me a new app, 'wow, I wanna try out, I am an Indian plus a software engineer I try out everything that is offered for free...' :) So I go ahead and click on it, breaking news 24 people are following you. Wow, I never knew there were so many people interested in my activities, few of them who must have presumed me dead before they actually saw me changing my status message and then getting into an argument about the same.
Why do I hate buzz? Because unlike many people, including software engineers, I am a little aware of the horrors of search and electronic information leaks. Blame it on the information I collected on internet search for my research through internet search.
The biggest shock came few years ago, when I learnt about AOL and how it lost its major customer base. A certain goodman, name withheld, thought it will be a good idea to make their web search data public, for purely research purposes. This data contained the search word, including the link clicked on by the person and worst the person ID, which if the person is a narcissist and has tried to lookup how many sites pop up if he searches for his/her own name, gets linked to his person ID and then if he goes on to put in his SSN for search, gets linked to his SSN, and well rest is all upto your imagination.
Of course the link was taken down, within a few hours but the damage was done, within a few hours there were several mirrors of the same material which are available even today. The data included everything from sewing machines to sex to how to murder your wife. And then I remember reading in some forum if the person planning to murder his wife and disposing her body in a very unmentionable manner could actually be executed and brought to justice. Well if the poor wife was indeed saved then there is atleast one person thankful of AOL data leak...
Similarly, few days ago Facebook changed its settings and made everything public by default, if you did not know that your settings have been reversed, God help you, if you still dont know this happened then even God cannot help you by now. Facebook, Twitter and all these websites today are followed by our future employers, parents and may be someday government (infact why maybe, I am sure they are already do this) so how could Facebook do that to me? This is a huge question and then Facebook asks me back are you educated enough to use me?
I am sure all my students, most of them freshmen, who are busy on Facebook while I am teaching, have no idea how this can affect them and their personal lives, I have seen teenagers confessing on youtube that they broke up with their girlfriends; not that he is a vulnerable kid and I was a predator audience, infact he is a famous Youtuber with a million subscribers and definitely earns more than me, but are you kidding me???
And as if all this was not enough, we now have buzz that allows people to stalk you even without asking for your permission and I am sure people are still discovering all that it is capable of doing and finding more things that they can find out about their friends and long lost classmates but they must realize that there could be someone unwanted looking at their profile too.
I am sure a day will come when an app will ask me for one click and then be able to use my camera to broadcast my daily life to my 'fans'. Ah! I cant wait for that day. So why do we curse hackers if this is the future? Today there are robots that crawl the blog and after enough training are able to generate a story of their own and soon you will have them write scripts of Hollywood movies. Next step will be read your status message and find out if you are contemplating suicide.
People who know me, know that I complain a lot, but also like to look for solutions. So here is what I propose lets be aware, I am not painting anyone black but lets all be a bit more responsible. And this blog I write just for my very excited and over enthusiastic kid sister, let us educate ourselves and also our vulnerable younger generation about the web and how it is such a wonderful source of education but if misused can be a curse too...
3 comments:
Don't cut yourself off from the rest of the world though!! We all still have to share information on the web and friends. My view is that data should have a set lifetime by default, without that, I agree that it is best to think twice about what data you release.
Don't you think it's up to you how much info you r posting on web?
say no to suicide!
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