Devoted to women of color in business

We are in a global civilization, where one mistake or one bad judgement is now public knowledge, forever. "I thought I was trying to be up with the latest technology. I guess a little bit of knowledge could be a dangerous thing," was Salisbury University President Janet Dudley-Eshbach's explanation. Photos on her Facebook profile included images from a family vacation, which she thought were only visible to family and friends, and some of those photos had captions that others thought inappropriate.

Similar to our "drunken pirate" episode with Stacy Snyder (link), and Representative Stark's comments about the war, caught on film (link), we're faced with another incidence of what theoretical physicist Michio Kaku calls "the birth of a type 1 civilization," which is a global civilization.

A family friend involved with undergraduate students says that their media departments are receiving increasing requests to remove newspaper articles, because students mentioned are now out looking for jobs, and their search results are not so flattering. I've mentioned the importance of controlling your own message and maintaining your brand through the media (link). Now is always a good time to do a search on yourself and see what gets turned up.

In our increasingly connected world, we have massive information overload. Almost any kind of information is available through a quick search. Almost any kind of product is available online. Almost any person with an e-mail address may be found through search engine work.

What's a privacy hound to do? Flee it? or embrace it?

In the meantime, we rely on supercompanies like Google or Amazon to mediate our search interface with this complex world, or we rely on "whuffie" and the good name/good social reputation of leaders in our fields. In doing so, we give up some of our ability to control our own information. Do you really believe your e-mail address is private?

Facebook, as of September 2007, is the 5th most visited website in the United States (according to Alexa.com rankings) after Yahoo!, Google, Myspace, and Facebook. Because of the growth of this site and others like it, I think that no information that you publish is truly private anymore: we are all responsible, we are all "on camera," and we are all able to interact directly with customers, associates, friends, or visitors. We no longer have the security of a protective wall around us, unless we specifically build that wall.

That said, today may be a good time to revisit your own policy or your company's policy on the difference between personal and work-related publications. You may desire to revisit your company's privacy policy. You may also consider how you share information, who has access to sensitive data like social security numbers and banking information, and any of your policies regarding sharing data. Are you spamming by mistake? Do you have an opt-out link? Are the people receiving your message truly the ones who want to hear that message?

Consider that any mistakes you make will be cached in Google or the WayBackMachine forever. Now's a good time to start cleaning out the closet.

In terms of your privacy in the age of the Information Mega-Superhighway, here's some quick advice: if you want something private, then don't share it. It's as simple as that.