Facebook or Tattoo?

A while back this posting came out from the Chief Security guru at the UMass Boston campus regarding the information you post on Facebook and how, by using it, you may potentially self-sabbotage future opportunities at jobs (or ever higher education). While there is some good advice given in the article, namely:

Make sure that you allow only people that you know for sure as friends and give them the access you want them to have. You never know when some stranger is looking at your personal information.

the blog post, in my opinion, fails to demonstrate that this is not just a shortcoming of facebook, but rather something that every web user has to know. Before facebook (and a lot of other Web 2.0 types of applications) only a few knowledgeable people were able to put stuff on the web. They knew that what they posted was public, and eventually what they found out was that someone was archiving it! If you know a URL and want to see what a website looked like in the past, go to the WayBackMachine at archive.org and have a look for yourself. Just because you pulled something off a server, it doesn't mea it's completely gone.

I think that we ought to teach our kids and our learners what the cautious way is to putting out information about ourselves, instead of fearmongering over one platform's security choices - after all, we may leave facebook, but there are other places out there that we post our info that can be problematic down the road.

As a side note, when I was a kid I thought a bobble bubble tattoo or a super mario tattoo would be cool ;-)

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