Last week Dalhousie University issued a memo to students warning them about the possible dangers of “social networking” sites, the primary one being Facebook. Dal staff estimate that the majority of Dalhousie students are registered with Facebook, and it seems that majority membership extends also to high schools and other institutions, plus the millions of older adults who have joined the craze.

Dalhousie’s warning, and its concern comes from a lack of control of the data students and others enter into sites like Facebook. The university is struggling with Facebook groups such as a recent one that protested experimentation with animals that may or may not be taking place at Dalhousie. The “may or may not” comes from the situation with online pages where someone can espouse any theory without the need for proof, and in many cases, it is difficult to even locate the poster let alone change the material or possibly prosecute. Someone recently compared the Internet to the old west, where law was a thing so difficult to enforce that people just made the best of it. Many governments have looked at the issue of controlling the Internet, but none have figured out how to do it. While Facebook does generally indicate the actual identity of each person (which can be a problem in itself), it doesn’t always do so, and other areas like web-based email addresses can be hiding places where anyone can shoot sometimes vicious arrows at people with relative safety. Most school struggle with “cyber bullying” emanating from Hotmail email addresses, and find on inquiry that Microsoft Hotmail will not release identifying information (if that is in any way true) without a court order from a US Judge.

While Dal has its own struggle with Facebook stories they consider based on half-truths, their perhaps self-serving warning to students concerns how freely their students seem to post information on such sites. Dal warns of the existing of “archiving” sites that attempt to gather as much information from the Internet as possible while searching for approaches to data manipulation and retrieval that will enable companies to get fairly comprehensive printouts from many facets of a person’s life: education, buying patterns, Internet surfing, legal actions, home ownership, financial records, vehicle registrations and travel patterns, social interaction on sites like Facebook, and generally just about any interaction they can throw into the mix.

For some reason, many people who use social sites like Facebook don’t seem to realize that when something is posted to the Internet, many people can access it. If it can be seen in your neighbour’s house, it can be seen in Kuala Lumpur. Privacy restrictions are available on most of these sites, but many users don’t fully understand how they work, or are naïve to the possibilities of unknown others looking. It’s extreme naivety that prompts a Facebook user to post “I’ll be away for the afternoon” when access to that is available to would-be burglars.

Universities like Dal warn their students that many companies where they might seek employment are now make “Googling” the applicant a normal part of the pre-interview routine. Searches for a Facebook profile may reveal one that suggests that drinking and partying are high on the applicants list of priorities, raising a red flag with personnel managers, as might indications of what might be interpreted as radical or anti-social views.

Most of us are completely naïve about the growing threat of identity theft, and don’t see the vast amount of information posted on sites like Facebook— email addresses, sometimes actual addresses or enough information to form them, relatives, friends, workplaces, social hangouts, churches, education, even the occasional phone number entered into Wall postings. “But they don’t have my credit cards!” say the innocent, but did you ever count the number of invitations to apply for a credit card that you receive in the mail? How about if they send one in your name, but with delivery to a different location?

I overuse the term “naïve”, but that quality of the users of online sites is what fraudsters bank on most. Many users of Facebook feel they understand how it works, and are happy with what they assume are the security protections they might use. Any online activity however, is simply packets of data zipping through the maze of the Internet, and susceptible to whatever hacking a person might devise. There are add-ons to Facebook now that will indicate who looks at your profile, or who checks out the pictures on your page. Certainly people are working on programs that will allow them to search Facebook to cull users for particular purposes.

We live in an information age. The amount of data that is out there is far beyond belief—the US National Security Agency has projects that gather data at the rate of four million gigabytes a month—in terms you don’t need to know, that’s now called four petabytes per month. In terms you might grasp, but not understand—if you counted once a second, counting that far would take you 127 million years!

Perhaps a wily fraudster would look at my age and financial status and decide that I just wasn’t worth the trouble, but for young people just starting careers, Dalhousie’s concerns are that this wallowing in personal information on sites like Facebook might come back to haunt students in ways they can’t yet imagine.

Would you believe that the World Wide Web was something we couldn’t imagine in 1990?

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