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Thursday, 15 January 2009

Privacy



I Hear You Knockin', But You Can't Come In

By Justin T. Carreño
Junto Staff Writer
Washington.
Last night I watched a show on MSNBC on how private companies obtain all kinds of information about every American to use mostly as a marketing tool. But they also provide it to the US government, if requested, and we are trusting our details to people we don't know.

I don't care who has information about me. I only care about intentions. Not much can be done with public accessible records.

But we can manage what we make available, especially online.

Many e-mail providers retain emails for months. Google never gets rid of them unless you delete them, then they are retained for a few months. Online searches are also retained and, I believe Google retains them forever as well, and can be traced to IP addresses (the unique identifier of your computer).
New areas of Online Identity Management (OIM) and Online Reputation Management (ORM), both of which have to do with how we balance what we want people to know about us or
what how we want to advertise ourselves versus what we don't want people to know about us or information we would like publicly available, but can actually be used against us.

To find out where you are on the Wb get searching. Google, Dogpile, Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo!, Alltheweb, and Technorati are good starts. (Not everything is on Google). Make note of where you are and what is available. And when you search, search your full name as well as aliases, initials, abbreviations, your email addresses, user id's, etc.
If you don't like what you see you can change your online presence through Online Enhancement (OE) or modification. You do this by putting more stuff about you that you want people to see to downplay stuff you don't want as advertised, making a greater percentage of your online presence about what you want most people to see.

There are also free search engine optimization (SEO) tools which allow you decrease or increase your ranking when searched.