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20111214 International Herald Tribune |
International Herald Tribune Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Page 18
Business with Reuters, Technology Communications
Nothing is private when it's all on Facebook
Disruption,
by Nick Bilton,
San Francisco
As much as it pains me to say this: privacy is on its deathbed.
I came to this sad realization recently when a stranger began leaving comments on photos I had uploaded to Instagram, the photo-sharing app for the iPhone.
After several comments--all of which were nice--I began wondering who this person was. Now the catch here is that she had used only a first name on her Instagram profile. You would think a first name online is enough to conceal your identity.
Trust me, it is not.
So I set out, innocently and curiously, to figure who she was.
I knew this person lived in San Francisco, from her own photos. At first I tried Google, but a first name and city were not enough to narrow it down. Then I went to her photos and looked for people whom she had responded to in the comments.
Eventually I found a conversation with someone clearly her friend. I easily found that person's full name, went to the person's Facebook friend list and searched for my commenter's first name.
There it was: a full name. With that, I searched Google and before I knew it, I had this person's phone number, home address and place of employment.
Creepy, right? I even had a link to a running app that she used that showed the path of her morning run. This took all of 10 minutes.
Nearly everyone has done something like this. Often, you do not even need a first name to find someone. Google, after all, has a feature that allows people to search with an actual image. No words or names required.
..."Our order only provides protection going forward," she said. "The only real option to protect information going backwards would be to delete your Facebook account."
Now which one of us is going to do that?
David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
December 14, 2011, Wednesday,
National Central Library,
Taipei City
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