No more social networking!

Yesterday in my Business Strategy class I learnt something so astonishing that I have eliminated myself from almost all of my social networking sites (and those that I signed up for but forgot about!).

My teacher came in to class and the class ended up talking about social networking to get to know each other. The conversation then wandered into 'dangerous' territory. He mentions that there are now people whose jobs is to trawl through the internet to dig up information about you. He told us that he could do that in 5 minutes to build my 'profile'. He continues to say that it's not a really deal-breaker but it does form a profile of who you really are. Are you complaining about your current employer? Are you always out drinking or using facebook during the day when you're supposed to be working? Even if your profile is set to private - someone out there is linked to you and you're profile will eventually be seen. It's not illegal - so technically employers are doing nothing wrong!

He then asks the class for anyone to volunteer their username. No one replied. They knew like I knew that he could probably do it because he seemed so confident. I mean this guy came in with all these small gadgets and a mobile number that's in a perfect sequence (**** 12345, worth almost $1.5mil in case you wanted to know). So sure as hell we believed him. But guess what I did. I volunteered! I figured, well I heard about this in newspapers long before he came along and thus never signed up to Facebook I was curious as to see what he could find.

So I told him the name I commonly use on the internet and OMG!! He found a MySpace site (it had nothing on it, but I think i signed up years ago in order to view the V network job site), he then found a Friendster, Bebo, MyMSN Space and Twitter profiles within 5 minutes FLAT. You should have seen him! By just my username he found on google my name whereby I left questions in technical forums for my uni work all the way to all my social networking sites! To add to that I never even REMEMBER signing up to those sites! I probably accidently followed some link that a friend sent which made me sign up for it! He also managed to trace my gmail, hotmail and yahoo email accounts despite the names being different! SHOCKERS!

However, most of those sites were literally empty and he goes that if a future employer were to ever 'search' me, they wouldn't find very much because I didn't put a whole lot of myself out there. If he stayed a little longer he could have found this Vox account if he wanted to.

The class was amazed as I was. Another girl came up and he found 100x more dirt on her that she knew she ever had! The poor girl. Her face was blushing and he requested him to stp after finding that an ex had a photo of her asleep on one of his social networking sites.

It can be done guys! And that's real freaky. Even if I didn't have much out there - the fact that I am still 'traceable' to these social networking sites is a scary thought.

Last night as soon as I got home I cancelled all my accounts except my emails and flickr....for now....

I don't want anything bad to be remotely near my name! I should be diggin out the $200 to join REAL networking sites like aim.com.au (Management network Australia) or something because these 'other' social networking sites are really bad.

Oh did I mention, he said that for his own company (he's owns a company by day and teaches by night) he heard from one of his ex-employees got fired from his next job because he tried to dodge some accounts - in the court case they used photos of him drunk (found courtesy of facebook) to use against him! Now I don't know if that's true or not but think about it, what's to stop companies from tracing that unforgivable photo of you to use in court (despite the date/age of when you took that photo)?

Un-networked or de-networked

Since it's such a gorgeous day outside might take a short walk, or if I get lazy just eat my milo.

'Milo! ' I scream