Consumer Bob

San Diego Consumer

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

By Consumer Bob
Posted on Tue, Apr 14th, 2009
Last updated Sun, Jun 14th, 2009

Who needs Big Brother to spy on us? We seem to be happy to lay open our personal lives for the world to see without any help from a totalitarian government. From Facebook to Twitter, people are using their online connections to reveal the most intimate details of their lives. We’ve gone from a generation of skeptics guarding their personal information as if it were gold to a generation willing to share every mundane aspect of their lives as if it had no value at all.

Facebook allows people to share, “What’s on your mind?” and people are more than willing to tell us where they are, what they’re doing and fill it with every inane aspect of their existence. What is the appeal? Are we in such need of validation that we have to tell people we’re changing the baby? That we love Dancing with the Stars? Or that we just wanted to express our love for the boyfriend, girlfriend, children or superhero and feel everyone on our “friends” list somehow wants or needs to know.

It all seems to trivialize our lives as if we live in a sitcom. It’s no wonder that the “Friends” and “Seinfeld” generation seem to be the most common casual commentators. But from my perspective we’re opening a beautifully adorned Pandora’s Box. It seems innocent, but from my perspective as a consumer reporter, life isn’t so sweet. The waters of the internet are full of sharks, people willing to capitalize on our naive postings.

For years our personal lives have been sold and traded as a digital commodity. The credit reporting companies are the most obvious buyers and sellers. Your financial profile is for sale and you generally have very little control of it. But there is so much more, everyone from Google to your favorite magazine collect data about you. That warranty card, your voter registration, your college alumni association all sell out your name, address and other details of your life for the right price.

And those are just the legal companies. The bad guys also swim the information seas looking for information about you. And like sharks smelling blood they have a frenzy with any financial finds. But who’s to say the information you leave out there for the world to see won’t come back to harm you? A predator first tries to gain your trust. How better to do that but to learn the name of your friends and family, all readily available on social networking sites. And once you post the family fact sheet there’s no getting it back. Like feathers in the wind, your thoughtful or thoughtless postings are nearly impossible to control.

And lets not forget Big Brother. A friend who lectures on privacy around the world says Europeans can’t believe the amount of personal information Americans allow to be collected. In the U.S. companies collect our information unless we say otherwise, in other parts of the world they can only put you in a database if you first give them your permission. Why are the Europeans so careful with their personal records? Look no further than Nazi occupation and government records. Information that seemed innocent enough was used to enslave a population.

Am I going too far with this? Believe me, I’m not trying to make a connection between Facebook and fascism, but I am trying to bring back a degree of discretion to this online open book we seem so quick to fill with the details of our lives. Be more careful with you personal information. Know who has access to your name, address, age, income, photographs and everything else we’re willing to float on the waters of our online existence. Limit your exposure, close the open book, practice privacy.

Keep Big Brother guessing.

About the author: CONSUMER BOB-- Bob Hansen has been fighting for the consumer in San Diego for more than 15 years. He's a television reporter for NBC in San Diego.
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(2)Comparison is made from the IP Address identity of the computer placing the posts. Some networks share these addresses between users.