Once the trend towards “blogging” took hold, the numbers just grew and after a while in most of the connected countries in the world, about one percent of the population, was blogging (and in France it was three percent, although I’m not sure why the Gallic tendency to blog was so high). It was clear that most of these blogs were visited more by tumbleweed than actual surfers, but it didn’t matter. People, kids especially, loved to publish themselves.

Then came the “dot me” and “dot us” sites like Facebook, Friendster, MySpace et al. Not just words, but pictures, music, video, chat, forums, event lists and classified ads. On blogs you could write, but on these sites you can dance. Nothing wrong with that—except that the blade cuts both ways. You can express yourself and expose yourself all at once. Here’s the rub:

• You may want everyone to know something about you,
• And you may want some people to know everything about you,
• But you probably don’t want everyone to know everything about you.

Most people know, without even thinking, that publishing your photograph, name and phone number on any web site is an act of profound naivety (or stupidity). If you’re female you might just as well advertise for stalkers. Even if you’re male, you’ll still attract some of the predators, swindlers, jerks and jokers who prowl cyberspace. In the early days of the Internet, nobody needed to be told this. You just knew to invent a false identity and email address, for surfing purposes. But these social networking sites have lulled some people, young people mainly, into a false sense of “network privacy”. There is no such thing as “network privacy” right now as recent events on Facebook indicate. Here’s two examples:

1. A college professor in North Carolina scanned Facebook.com profiles to determine which students to accept into his class.
2. Penn State University campus police used Facebook to identify students who rushed the field during the October Penn State vs. Ohio State University game (two police officers were injured). The field invaders formed an “I rushed the field” group, complete with names and pictures. They might as well have sent their confessions in by email.

Facebook is limited to those with an edu identity—it was only semi-private, but it is now beefing up its privacy.

There are already many examples of people losing their jobs for blog posts or for other postings they have made on the web that have no direct connection with their job—on MySpace, for example. Why would employers not use information about you on the web if you put it there? If you’re a female teacher who posts naked pictures on yourself on the web, you’re asking for trouble. (There have already been a few examples of female teachers losing their jobs this way).

Personal privacy can be guaranteed quite effectively by authentication, but network privacy cannot, because it only takes one member of the network to compromise it and proving who did it will never be simple.

The sad thing about privacy is that all the technology that is needed to preserve privacy actually exists, but the violations of privacy—from identity theft through to searching through semi-public postings—have not provoked enough outrage to ensure its widespread use. Until privacy is properly protected, you need two Internet identities; your public one and your completely anonymous private one.