ON REPUTATIONAL MORTALITY FOR ALL OF US

ALL HANG OUT

Given the on-going discussion around Facebook's privacy policies, here's a priceless bit from an article in the UK's Guardian on online privacy:

"A survey found that although 71% of 14- to 21-year-olds did not want their future employers to look at their profiles on social networking sites, only 40% realised that their online activities could be traced indefinitely."

And this is the "net-savvy" generation, the one that's supposed to know how it all works.

I talked about how the MySpace and the original Facebook generation needs to take their online privacy more seriously, a year and a half ago, emphasizing that:

"...it's not just about their behavior on services like MySpace and Facebook, but their conduct all across the web, including services like instant messaging, SMS texting and the like. 

They are leaving reputational footprints that in many cases will be a matter of permanent record, potentially increasing their reputational mortality."

Ironically, just as these "young 'uns" are getting more concerned about their online reputations, the older fogies like myself are emulating them and throwing their traditional caution to the wind. 

They're embracing social networking and new communications services like Twitter, sharing the minutiae of their lives with strangers and near-strangers.

And services like Facebook are signing on partners across the web with services like Beacon to transmit your daily activities across the web to your mini news feed on Facebook.  I've written about this a few days ago, and Dare Obasanjo just had a good post on how this works.

We've all heard the arguments on why the traditional privacy concerns don't matter and why it's really different this time.  Any one want to crack at guessing the odds?

Comments

[alex tolley]

OTOH, once everyone is much more public, maybe this changes the game? For example, my last company hired a VP who had a zero web footprint. I took that as a negative and it turned out that the person was incompetent to do the job.

It is possible that what one's public reputation, as long as it is not really bad, may be necessary to get hired at all. That the age of anonymity, that most city dwellers have become used to, is drawing to a close. It is rather like growing up in a village - everyone knows who you are.

For the people with bad adult reputations - I welcome that sunshine to illuminate who they are so that they can be avoided. These people thrive on being able to con the next person or organization. Reducing the information asymmetry about them would be socially beneficial.

[Jason]

This seems like a great opportunity for startups like REPUTATION DEFENDER. They are really at the cutting edge of helping the facebook generation deal with the future implications of this...