According to an article on Mashable, your Facebook profile will be appearing on Google next month.
If you thought the news feed was a threat to your privacy, be warned: Facebook is announcing Public Search Listings today, meaning profiles will be searchable through Facebook, and soon turn up on Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.
As of tomorrow, search will be available through Facebook; users will then have one month to change their privacy settings before profiles get indexed by the major search engines. These results will include, at most, your name and profile picture.
So anything on there you would not want a current, prospective, future employer or family member or associate or your bank manager or insurance company to view, remove it now before it’s too late!
I heckled from the back about how not only are you viewable on Google Street View but your image may then make the rounds on social news sites such as Digg. As you can see from here there are quite a few Digg front page stories that focus on Google Street View. Remember that a Digg story with two thousand odd diggs, will generally generate about fifty to a hundred thousand page views!
Personally I think it is a real issue and can only get worse.
It reminds me of a novel I once read in which privacy disappears (not through the internet but by wormholes).
The Light of Other Days looks at how the invention of wormholes which allow you to view anywhere anytime impact on society.
‘Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. Right?’ With these words Hiram Patterson, head of the giant media corporation OurWorld, launches the greatest communications revolution in history. With OurWorld’s development of wormhole technology, any point in space can be connected to any other, faster than the speed of light. Realtime television coverage is here: earthquakes and wars, murders and disasters can be watched, exactly as they occur, anywhere on the planet. Then WormCams are made to work across time as well as space. Humanity encounters itself in the light of other days. We witness the life of Jesus, go to the premiere of Hamlet, solve the enigmas that have baffled generations. Blood spilled centuries ago flows vividly once more – and no personal treachery or shame can be concealed. But when the world and everything in it becomes as transparent as glass and there are no more secrets, people find new ways to gain vengeance and commit crime, and Hiram Patterson finds new ways to keep his Machiavellian schemes secret.’
At 5.38pm I blogged about arriving in Nottingham for the ALT-C conference.
I was just checking the stats when I noticed that one of the search terms used was james clay nottingham as I was using Firefox I right clicked and did a Google search.
Wow my blog entry was already ranked number one!
I doubt it will stay that way, but it does demonstrate how Google is becoming better at searching for current things and things which are happening now as well as everything else.
Next question who was searching for me in Nottingham?
Having attended a really interesting session on Shibboleth and Federated Access, I am currently listening to the plenary about the other parallel sessions.
It is proving to be a useful and interesting conference. What is nice is that the presentations and other reports will be available on the conference blog.
Though the content of the conference is on digitisation and e-content, it is interesting how the focus of much of the conference is on web 2.0 and (unsurprisingly) Google. I suspect that this is down to the focus on end users’ needs rather than coming from an institutional approach.
A lot of talk about elephants as well, of which I seemed to have missed somehow the connection.
The plenary has finished and we are now looking at tomorrow.
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
looks at how the invention of wormholes which allow you to view anywhere anytime impact on society.
Having attended a really interesting session on Shibboleth and Federated Access, I am currently listening to the plenary about the other parallel sessions.