Sunday, October 10, 2010

Privacy, Social Media, and How We Define Ourselves

In an interesting series of articles Brian Solis has been exploring how privacy is changing and where it may be heading in the future. For the privacy we had in the past isn't what we have today and how it's going to change in future is an interesting conjecture. But when you realize that even your future job or credit score may well already depend on what is on you social media sites it starts to hit home. We can either understand that what we do and say on line becomes a profile used in may ways to judge as and so work to have it show us in the most favorable way or suffer the consequences. And to see that many children have emails and FaceBook pages set up by excited parents even BEFORE birth shows just how much this thing called social media has taken hold. So next time before you post that cool picture showing yourself passed out on the floor at a friends party remember who may be checking it out and not finding it cool at all.

Amplify’d from www.briansolis.com

A recent study by security company AVG and Research Now surveyed  2,200 mothers in North America (USA and Canada), the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), Australia/New Zealand and Japan, and found that 81 percent of children under the age of two currently have some kind of digital profile or footprint, with images of them posted online. 92 percent of U.S. children have an online presence thrust upon them by the time they are 2 years old. In many cases, a digital presence is born before the child, with sonograms (23%) actively published and shared on social networks and blogs.

While innocent in nature, this behavior exhibits the simplicity of sharing first and the recognition of potential consequences later.

I believe that we are the last generation to know privacy as it was and from now on, it will have to be taught. We are entering a new era of publicness or publicy, where we are solely responsible for creating and defining our online persona. Some will learn the hard way. Others will learn to take the wheel of their personal brand and steer it in a direction that reveals meaningful opportunities and experiences.

Studies already show that as much as 64 percent of HR managers screen candidates by what they find on social networks. 88% of universities rate social media important in evaluating prospective students. Lenders are researching your social graph to assess your credit risk.

Read more at www.briansolis.com
 

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