Internet Privacy

My parents were incredibly distrustful of the internet from the first dialup aol service we tried when I was four years old.  Back then we were worried about getting viruses from floppy discs, which seems silly now, but they were not nearly as searchable and accessible to users as they are today.  I remember my grandfather teaching me the rudiments of navigating MS DOS (which i only used to load games) and how complex it seemed just to navigate file paths and understand the contents of a floppy disc.

People have always understood the dangers of internet use.  Social applications, however, seem to 'trick' people into letting their guard down.  Because these applications are so personal, people seem to assume that they have a sure way of protecting information.  This sort of thinking is a myth in the same vein as 'it must be true or they wouldn't put it on television'.

I've been pretty careful about what goes on my personal pages.  But no one can have control of what others post of them.

I've googled myself before, but this time I found photos of me in the google image results that I never knew existed from a festival I played at years ago.  Its not a problem for me, but candid photos appearing on the internet unannounced can represent a major privacy infringement if the conditions are right.  Once it was only celebrities that had to worry about published widespread slander, but now its all of us.