Great question, @talljasperman. The answer isn’t as simple as it might seem, and it’s particularly important that those of us who share things on social media have a clear understanding of where to draw the line.
I am constantly amazed when I hear of someone losing a job they’ve applied for, getting turned down by a college, failing a security check or whatever because they unwisely posted on the Internet more about themselves than they should have. For instance, if you aced the SAT tests, do not reveal online that you did it by cheating. College admissions officers may now read your Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. page/s. They do searches for your name and perhaps even nicknames. There’s a substantial chance they will find things you’ve posted about yourself.
If you’re applying for a job with the FBI, it might be a bad idea to tweet about a wild weekend snorting coke and drinking red bull and vodka shots. As a Web developer, I warn my clients that the Internet is an inordinately poor hiding place. Don’t put anything there you don’t want others to know about you.
Obviously that includes personal identification info such as your Social Security number, any passwords, your bank account information, etc. Note that hackers also use searches of a target individual’s name and any nicknames that name turns up to find out things like mother’s maiden name, city of birth, pet’s name, date of birth and such. So if thise things are online, don’t use them as the secondary questions on password protected sites.
I share things about myself here on Fluther that I wouldn’t dare put on the Internet if I were going to apply for a job, a security clearance, or some such thing. Because I am self employed and past retirement age, I feel reasonably safe doing so. But younger people should not share embarrassing sexual escapades unless they are certain there is no way to link the pseudonym they share it under to their real life identity.
I did lose a potential Web Development client due to something that he read on my Facebook page. It was a local start-up business and they banked where I do. When I was talking to one of the bank officers about some business banking issues of my own, he learned that I’m a Web developer, and he thought of these guys he is helping get their business up and running. They had told him they needed to find a developer for their site. So he passed my name, phone number and my website URL on to them. One of the two partners contacted me several days later and told me that he had looked at my Facebook page, and that because I favored Net Neutrality, we would not be doing any business together. So it’s pretty hard to second guess what fact may rub someone else the wrong way.
