Did you know if you type your screen name into Google...

“ego surfing” has been around for more than a decade. My real name brings up a wealth of information about my professional history, if you look me up. Nearly every internet professional I’ve worked with from my consulting business over the last few years, I’ve “googled” and gotten a good sense of who they are, what they’ve done, and where they are going.

a social site, the walled garden online social network, is opening up it’s pages to search engines, specifically to remove that notion of privacy you may feel from using it’s site. a social site has long been open to search engine indexing as well.

Every large scale social site has tackled this issue in some way, shape, or form. The reason we allow people to anonymize their questions if they like is a small step towards allowing people, here, to control some amount of privacy of what data they provide to the site.

Participate in Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, etc? Those are in search engines as well, under your Yahoo or Google ID, which is typically linked to your email address. Contact an employer about a job opportunity with that same Yahoo ID or Google Account? They can then connect the dots.

Privacy, online, is a big, complex issue. Personally, I’m OK with people knowing stuff, however, it’s a shocker to some when they finally wake up. Kind of like Neo, in the matrix, when he wakes up in the machine…