Just found this through lifehacker and thought it was appropriate. It's called WebMii and it lets you put in your first and last name to see if anything related to you comes up. It covers the usual facebook, twitter, and myspace, but also websites and other extraneous occurrences. It does cover everyone with your name, though. If you're John Smith, there will be a ton of results. Apparently, there's a decent guitarist who has my exact name, so that was the majority of what came up. Also, aside from Facebook, I don't think my full name is attached to anything, so I wasn't expecting much.
I just searched myself. Ironically enough the most damaging thing that came up was a paper I half assed for a professor sophomore year. Any employer who reads it will think I'm a retard. I need to flood the internet of pictures of me binge drinking to hide this potentially career killing paper.
The one thing that hasn't been mentioned here is the permanence of information on the Internet. You can use sites like the Internet Archive to look up things that were posted (true or not) 10-15 years ago. What happens when Google implements the "Google Archive" feature and lets you look at the entire web like it was 5-10 years ago ? What happens if Facebook does a bad code release, accidentally resets all privacy settings to "fully public", and "Google Real Time Indexing" pulls all of that instantly into the Google Archive ? It may be unfair to judge you at 30 or 40 for what you did at 20 or 25, but a lot of people will do that regardless of it being unfair. Putting any public information on the Internet scares me. Having worked at a few Internet companies, wow do we do horrible things with your data.
Well, I don't know, can the term, "duh" be applied here? Really, all that the founders of facebook did was take the idea of myspace and run with it. They did what just any other business would do when it sees an innovative idea. As far as privacy goes, every single person that has grown up in the internet age has been blatantly warned about internet privacy - which basically means that there is no internet privacy. You have your life exposed, you say stupid shit, and post embarrassing pictures on the largest social "networking" site there is, and you feel you're going to get 0% backlash because of it? Well, that makes you a moron. Common sense is still worth something, but people seem to have to go through certain experiences and learn their common sense, unfortunately. As far as Zuckerberg's comments about how this is the social norm, and how people are becoming more comfortable with sharing their information, I will call bullshit on that. What is happening, though, is that people are no longer, on a large scale when it comes to facebook and other social "networking" sites, getting the peer-to-peer, first-hand experience. They're typing shit into a computer or phone, so it isn't as immediately as tangible as telling a person something face-to-face. And it's still relatively fucking new. It's like having a piece of plastic to pay for things - it's not tangible. Those are not literal, physical dollars and cents you're spending, so you don't see the repercussions of it at the point of action. It may trickle down later, but right now you're good. Is it a good thing? Fuck no. Are we going to continue to slide in this direction? Yes. Is facebook running the world right now? No, but it is a pretty large playground for people. Zuckerberg's psychoanalytical shit is just that. It's shit. He's got a fad running right now, and is the - really - third to fourth generation player on this, and is currently the King for the day. Facebook created this social trend no more than Microsoft created the computer. They are just on top right now, and are enjoying the sun rays while they can. Or at least they should. They've expanded things to a new level that people are not accustomed to, but it doesn't mean that people are dictating the sharing of their private information so freely, on a long term, simply because facebook fucking told them so. Jesus. Shortsighted, much?