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Path: To Trust or Not to Trust?

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privacy fail

In a nutshell: Path, a facebook-like social networking app, recently found themselves in hot water after a programmer discovered they’re uploading your entire address book to their Web servers when you use it.  Mike Arrington’s proposed solution is they should “nuke” all their data (and as disclosure, he’s an investor in the company).  My initial reaction is this is absolutely correct, but doesn’t necessarily address my real concern – moving forward, can I actually decide to trust Path or not?

I am in the “no photos of my kids on Facebook” camp.  Why?  Because Facebook has demonstrated a fairly deliberate motive to not keep my data private.  The company actually believes privacy is “Dead” so why would they even care about this kind of a thing?  They don’t, and that’s their decision, and since I think privacy is alive and well, I make the (easy) choice not to share anything about my children there (for so many reasons, but here’s one if you need it).  Enter Path.

When I first tried Path (and by the way, it’s one of the most beautiful apps I’ve seen for my iPhone), it seemed fairly clear they were pretty dedicated to privacy and your “real” social network.  Initially you were limited to 50 friends, and all sharing happened within the confines of the app itself.

Now, the 50 friends limit is up to 150, the app enables sharing to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, and, lo and behold, there’s a privacy fail.

One can quickly look back to Facebook and say “privacy fail = no big deal”, unless, of course, your value proposition is around privacy!

As they say, it takes a lifetime to build trust, and mere moments to utterly destroy it.

Path is at a crossroads.  They must decide what they are, and what their stance on privacy is, and they must do it imminently.  If they want to be “the social network you can trust”, they have that opportunity.  But they are on the verge of squandering it.  Which leaves them as “the social network that’s not Facebook or Google+” and in that mode, I can’t imagine them doing more than just eking it out if they continue down this… wait for it… path.

I’d love to see Dave Morin (Path’s CEO) use this moment to step up, make a public statement on what the company’s vision is and what they stand for.  I for one hope they don’t choose… poorly.

We Need a Digital Do Not Disturb System

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I don’t need to write much “backstory” on this one.  Thanks to the technologies that pervade our lives, we are in a hyper-connected world.  But methinks it’s too much, and the blame lies solely on us, but all of us and in two different ways.

  1. We let ourselves get interrupted.  Multitasking is basically a lie, nobody’s good at it, and it’s proven unproductive.  If you have multiple windows doing different things, bottom line is you are getting less done.  Further, we leave our ringers on, have pop-up alerts for lots of things (from meeting notifications to Twitter DMs), leave our chat/IM programs open, have email checking once a minute, etc.
  2. We interrupt others.  Sending a chat request, a text message, a DM, etc is, in effect, an interruption on someone else’s time.  I loved Jeff Jarvis’ post on how we need to redefine “rude”.  The problem right now is, we’ve all accepted so many interruptions as “the norm” that we are imposing it upon others, and expecting them to react to our whims.

We need to fix this, and soon.  And I don’t mean for the “decreased productivity” factor – Americans especially have gotten far too focused on how productive we all are.  Here was Bobby Kennedy’s famous quote on measuring productivity:

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

I think we’ve all tolerated these interruptions because we are chasing these false ambitions, and perverting the concept of productive to “work all the time, letting anything interrupt me, because it makes me seem/feel busier and therefore more important and more productive.”  I suggest we stop it.  And, since I’m human too, I’m going to state that I am fairly guilty myself, but I’m working on it.

I want a “do not disturb” app.  I want it to run on my desktop, iPad, iPhone, and laptop.  I want it to let me control when I’m interruptible and when I’m not.  I want it to work in a “polite” way, so nobody thinks I’m avoiding “them” but can be properly informed that I’m using this block of time to work on something specific.  I want it to let someone override in case of emergency, and I want it to mesh with my schedule.  I don’t need it to be very “smart”, it doesn’t have to “learn”, it just has to work.  And yes, I know it’s impossible, and this is unicorn territory.

But what I can do in the meantime…

  • Shut down Tweetdeck and start using Twitter when I want to, not worrying that I’ll “miss something” because in all truth, real-time is irrelevant for 99% of our personal and professional lives (unless you are actually in the media).
  • Turn off all notifications on my iPhone.
  • Close Skype and Adium except for when I want to chat with someone (which I’ve hopefully scheduled already).
  • Close mail, only checking it a few times a day – and move all “rapid back & forth” email conversations to the phone.

I have no idea how to do the above 4 things and actually make it work, but I’m going to try.

ps – my official interruption count while writing this was: 3 incoming texts, 1 twitter DM, 1 Skype instant message, 1 appointment reminder, and a Words With Friends update (I won – yeah, baby!).

GIVING NOTICE: I'm reclaiming Facebook for personal use

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According to Facebook, I have over 400 friends.  According to the number of people with whom I share personal things, go out for drinks, have over for dinner, call to catch up, and otherwise consider “Friends”, that number is off by a long shot.  So I’m going to fix it, and I’ll explain why.

I consider myself quite a social, yet private person (yes, privacy matters, and is not going away anytime soon).  I speak at a good number of public events, am decently well known in the tech industry, and am generally “out there”.  But I don’t like to share my personal life with everyone, partially because I don’t think everyone cares, but mostly because I consider my life private.  I neither need nor want “the world” to know whether I go for a bike ride with my kids, have a date night with the wife, catch up with an old friend over a beer, or any other “regular living” activity.  But it’s deeper than that.

I firmly resent the notion that I am supposed to have to include anyone and everyone I’ve ever met into my personal life, and even if it’s considered an industry faux pas, I simply don’t care anymore.  I have plenty of vehicles for communicating anything remotely work/tech/industry related, and plan to continue to use them.  Facebook, for me, is supposed to be my personal network, not my professional one.

So here’s my new Facebook friend policy:

  • Actual Friends, not “friendly acquaintances”
  • Current Friends, not “people I kinda knew in high school”
  • Work people I go out with socially, not “someone I met at a conference and exchanged business cards”
  • etc

In the next few days, I’ll be UNfriending anyone who doesn’t make the above list.  This might sound harsh or alienating, but I like to live my life assuming everyone has enough self-esteem.  I don’t look at this as rejection, and I hope anyone who gets unfriended doesn’t think of it that way either – it’s not.  Just because I like someone and have a professional relationship with them doesn’t mean we’re Friends.

While I might be an “early rejector” I fundamentally believe I won’t be the last, and most folks will come around the conclusion that they need to separate out their personal lives from the professional. While there will be many who have some blend (I believe I’ll be in that camp),  It really never should’ve gotten so far out of hand in the first place. I hope my actions can help others who are feeling the same way, but scared of the potential backlash.

11 Things You Should Never Do Online

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Did you know you could lose insurance benefits from putting photos online?  Or that a Tweet can put you in jail?  Or that the FBI might be friending you on Facebook?  Or that even brand-new service Chatroulette isn’t truly anonymous? I’ve blogged recently on my concerns about privacy trends, and it’s quite the hotly debated topic these days.

I see two primary reasons why you shouldn’t do something online:

  • Personal Harm/Loss
  • Future Regret

So without further adieu, here’s 11 Things You Should Never Do Online!

  1. Show your goods. One would think this would be obvious. One would imagine that an individual would not normally choose to show their private parts to the entire world, presuming they are not in the adult entertainment industry. It took me less than a minute on Chatroulettemap to find a picture of a naked guy, and his hometown (pictured here, safely edited by me). Here are some NSFW pictures found on Facebook. Why shouldn’t you do this? How about “decency” or “self-respect”? I wouldn’t even call it prudish to say there is a reason for the phrase “private parts” and some things are simply best left out of the public eye. Leave it to the pro’s, people.  Nobody’s going to be walking around when they are 80 years old saying to themselves “I sure regret not showing my penis to the entire world.”  Unless they have some kind of exceptional penis, that is.
  2. Meet a random stranger in a non-public location. As a child I was taught not to get into cars with strangers.  Of course I was also using public transportation as of age 8, but I don’t think that’s too contradictory.  We’ve heard numerous stories of people meeting strangers via sites like Craigslist, then bad things happen.  I have no problem with online dating services, but use some common sense people.  How about having 2-3 dates in public before you decide to even reveal your home address (assuming you haven’t done so already online – see more below)?  Why shouldn’t you do this? Pretty much goes without saying – and while there will always be creeps and they will always find methods of doing terrible things, but how about not enabling them to occur so easily?
  3. Publicize travel plans. Be it foursquare, brightkite, gowalla, plancast, tripit, dopplr or anything else, the concept that an individual would specifically tell anybody in public that they aren’t at home is something I personally find mind-boggling.  Whether it’s a simple burglary (or much much worse), there’s no greater bait I can think of for a wrong-doer. And to think that all criminals are simply too stupid to figure this out is somewhere between ignorant and elitist. Heck, teenagers in the UK find empty swimming pools with Google Earth, and thieves last year used it to find and steal koi fish from backyards.  Why shouldn’t you do this? It doesn’t take extreme paranoia or a DVD collection of Law and Order to come to the simple conclusion that these activities are asking for trouble.  Combine public records with services like plancast and twitter, and you have the equivalent of a “how-to rob me” service that you are proactively choosing to use – it’s gonna happen.
  4. Share identity-revealing data. Over 9 million Americans have identity theft issues every year. Why on Earth would you make it easier for them?  Further, one of the easiest methods of gaining access to an identity is through simple human error and naivete.  If you put personal information, like say your credit card activities, proactively into the public eye, you are asking for problems.  And unlike physical thieves (per the above point), phishers currently use technology to steal information.  You want to put your phone number in public? Fine! Get a Google Voice account, set up a redirect, and use that.  But don’t put the same number you have to authenticate important personal records! Why shouldn’t you do this? Actually this should be the opposite question – why oh why would you put private data out in public? If I can’t get you to stop buffoonery, fine, but at least be on the watch for things that can impact your finances and credit score!
  5. Ignore privacy requests/needs of others. It’s perfectly legal to take pictures of people in public. It’s also perfectly legal to put those pictures in the public spectrum (so long as you aren’t profiteering from their likeness).  But that doesn’t mean you have to.  Some people prefer to keep their lives completely out of the public eye, and they have the right to do so (despite what many social media bloggers would like to say).  Just because you choose to publicize your life doesn’t mean everyone else has to as well.  Furthermore, and more specifically, parents should rethink what pictures they put online in public or semi-public locations.  Maybe your kids won’t want those pictures to be accessible one day when they are older – and I can guarantee they’ll have a tough time taking them down.  The oh-so-cute moments in the bath might be funny to reveal at a wedding or bar mitzvah (both private events, mind you), but how about during their sophomore year in high school, to the whole class? Not so much. Why shouldn’t you do this? It’s inconsiderate – and that’s enough of a reason.
  6. Reveal vices. My healthcare company is raising our rates 35% this year – despite no claims or major changes of status.  Their business, in a nutshell, is to profit as greatly as possible, which they accomplish by (1) raising rates, and (2) giving out minimal claims/benefits.  I will say the following unbiased and bluntly: it is in their interest to find evidence of you smoking, drinking, and otherwise acting recklessly because it lets them profit more. If I were you, I’d make sure there were no tweets, status updates, or anything else containing “So drunk I almost fell down the stairs” or “Onto my 2nd pack today. Boy these Marlboros are smooth” etc.  Why shouldn’t you do this? If you don’t think insurance companies, healthcare providers, or other “big brother-like” organizations will use social technologies to raise rates or otherwise increase profits, you are just fooling yourself.  Drink, smoke, be merry – and just enjoy it with the people you are actually spending the time with (they’ll probably appreciate it too).
  7. Mock those you may do business with. A famous PR exec once tweeted disparagingly about a magazine his firm had to pitch.  The editor in chief saw the tweet.  An ad agency salesman on his way to pitch a client openly mocked the city in which that client lived. The client saw the tweet.   Disparaging a potential (or existing) client is generally speaking, not the way one gets more business from said client.  The whole concept of doing things in public means anyone might just see them – including the people you are trying to get to spend money on you. Why shouldn’t you do this? How about… “livelihood”?
  8. Sound like a schmuck. Per the above point, you never know who is going to see the words you write. Your “witty banter” with an old high school friend on Facebook might not sound so clever to a potential employer.  I’ll be the first to admit that I am a cynic and an outspoken one, and I am certain this colors peoples’ opinions of me. But I also do my best to sound objective and educated about whatever topics I’m talking about.  While I’m sure I’ve tweeted things I shouldn’t have, or left comments on blogs that could be misconstrued, I generally make a concerted effort to consider my commentary and how it would be interpreted by a complete stranger (though I could still use improvement myself).Why shouldn’t you do this? Your words will come back to haunt you – how about just not saying them in the first place?
  9. Publicize your partying or let your friends put up embarrassing photos/videos of you. The most famous example I’ve found so far involves a swimmer and an arbitrarily-banned substance. Whoever took that picture is, in a word, a jerk. Not as big of a jerk as whomever made this happen, but a pretty big jerk nonetheless. But when you compare it to the amazing amount of inappropriate stuff you can easily find with simple Google searches, you really start to wonder if the entire concept of self-respect has gone out the window.Why shouldn’t you do this? A future employer? A future spouse? Your kids one day? Your grandkids? How about anyone you want to not massively unimpress one day.
  10. Be inconsistent with your real life claims. If you call in sick, stay offline! Let’s face it, lying consistently can be challenging – it’s something you really have to work hard at. So if you are going to call in sick, you probably shouldn’t update your Facebook status or tweet or do anything else that conflicts with your claim. I recall the classic “which tire?” tale from university lore, only dramatically more impactful with public timelines and social presences.  You should also know that when you take pictures and upload them to sites like Picasa or Flickr, the actual day/time is logged in that photo somewhere as well. Why shouldn’t you do this? Hopefully you don’t need me to tell you not to lie or otherwise make false claims in the office space or personal life.  But if you are going to, try to tow the line with your online presence as well.
  11. Assume you are not being recorded. We decided at the office to try playing Chatroulette last month. Every time we used it, we recorded our session (using freely available screen capture tools), just in case something funny/outrageous happened (and it did, and no, I won’t be sharing with the group).  Your web history is recorded by Google (if you are logged in).  Facebook knows everything you’ve done.  Most Web sites store your IP address along with the comment you leave.  The Internet Archive stores copies of just about everything. Your cookies have privacy flaws. When you do something on the Internet, it is there to stay. Don’t forget it!

The funny thing (if there is one) on the above list is if you were to ask your grandparents if you should do any of those things, they’d give you one of those “what’s wrong with you boy?” looks.  But instead here you are reading my blog because it’s actually a topic.  Them kids today…

Your Privacy Online: The Internet's Greatest Bait and Switch

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There was a time when things like decency, self-respect, and privacy mattered, and that time was not too long ago. I’m not going to spend this post lamenting modern society abandoning the concept of self-respect, poise, decency, and other things which seem practically alien in our show-all, tell-all, midriff-sporting, trampstamp-pride (yeah, I hate the word too, but it’s appropriate) oriented culture. I may seem like one heck of an old fogie, but I’m talking about a time I remember that was less than 15, maybe even 10 years ago! With regards to the “living near the bottom” mindset America seems stuck in, I think (hope) it’s just a natural cycle and it will just get better in time. But when it comes to the privacy topic, I’m more than disappointed, I’m near outraged. And I’m going to point some fingers.

It’s hard to say when and where we decided to give up our rights to privacy online. Note that I’m focusing to the online world, and have no commentary regarding people’s ability to do things like steal credit card receipts, dumpster dive, or other methods of specifically targeting an individual, as these take concerted and directed effort. One could argue the entire concept of the “social web” might be in exact defiance of personal privacy. Some of the early players (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all things social on the web!), in semi-chronological order:

  • Geocities – instead of, well, not really existing online, you can have a home page! Unquestionably the first time people chose to give up personal privacy for some flirtation with Internet fame – but – it was at a time when there was little “networking” from one site to another, so a given person’s home page actually was it’s own disconnected “island” on the Internet (as opposed to the inherent connected nature of services like Facebook). Geocities deserves special mention for being the first (but far from last) time an individual could not only create their own customized page, but make it extremely ugly and hard to read. Privacy impact: moderate.
  • Delicious – instead of keeping your favorite bookmarks to yourself, share them with the world! The reality of the potential harm here is fairly low, as one still has a local bookmark capability through the Web browser AND one can easily choose not to share a bookmark they don’t want shared. Privacy impact: negligible.
  • MyBlogLog – instead of being able to read a blog post in relative anonymity, a “footprint” is left of the trail you have as you surf various blogs. Again, this is extremely opt-in, however, the mere enablement of this plug-in on a blog meant a third-party could specifically “follow” you as a unique Web surfer. Privacy impact: low.
  • Flickr – instead of having to manually share your photos with your friends/family, automatically upload your photos into the public eye unless you specify otherwise. Flickr represented a massive shift in thinking, and I’d personally argue it ushered in the concept of “live in public” to the masses. Example search for pictures that are probably going online without consent of those who are actually in the pictures. Privacy impact: major.
  • Friendster – technically not the first attempt at social networking, but the first one to bring it to a wide spectrum of users. I honestly don’t even remember what I did on Friendster, other than befriend the fake users others had so much fun creating (except for the management team, who clearly thought using the Internet for anything fun was a bad idea). Friendster marked the first time people really paid attention to “numbers of friends” as a metric of importance (ah, the implacable human ego). Privacy impact: moderate-to-low.
  • YouTube – Take Flickr up a notch, by enabling anyone, no matter how dreary and boring, to have their own special place to upload pirated commercial personal videos. Prior to YouTube one was judged purely on their attractiveness (based on the best-looking picture of themselves ever taken, regardless of how long ago), but now we could take every embarrassing, awkward, and goofy moment we have, and immortalize ourselves online with it. It didn’t take long for YouTube to be the haven for people falling off skateboards, failed catapult launches, or (one of my personal favorites) take the video of your friend accidentally hurting herself and further embarrass her by putting it on the Internet – but don’t worry, she didn’t bleed or anything (now that is a great example of friendship!). Privacy impact: major.
  • MySpace – It’s like GeoCities, but now with 10 times the ugly, and more ways to connect than ever before. Originally started as a way for bands to connect with their fans (and for fans to connect with each other), MySpace evolved (or devolved) into a haven for bizarre methods of self-representation, a lustfulness for comment-writing and a bizarre desire to have as many friends as is humanly possible. Today it’s a bit of a “black sheep” in the social networking world, but still has millions of people sporting the most outrageous color schemes (oh look, it’s red-on-red, hey thanks!) and online “bling” imaginable. Privacy impact: massive.
  • Blogging – While there’s no specific technology at play here, the notion that one and all could have a “web log” aka a public diary became very in vogue in the latter half of the aughts (you know, the decade that just ended?). Blogs were key to creating the illusion that one’s deeper thoughts should be shared, in written form, with the world. Since there’s actually a decent amount of work required in order to blog, and most blogs are rapidly abandoned, on an individualized basis it’s not a big deal – except for those who go overboard. And yes, I do get the irony of this blog post. Privacy impact: minor-to-major (highly self-inflicted!).
  • Zoominfo – You might not have heard of this one, but ZoomInfo.com uses all the content it can find about you to build a profile of who you are (or might be) – screenshot is below. On the plus side, they will allow you to effectively delete your profile, and it’s really focused on your business “identity”, but if you ever needed an example of how scary the concept of being stalked online is, this is the one. To be clear, the company itself is not doing anything wrong, they are simply finding information about you through completely publicly available sources, that’s the scary part. Privacy impact: N/A – they themselves merely aggregate stuff.
  • Twitter – Without analyzing use of the service, Twitter is just a “public update” one can make, in 140 characters or less. Not a big deal. However, the cultural shift one is inclined towards after deep adoption of the use is where the problems show up. For those who actually use the service (which is not the majority of Twitter’s users), there is a sensation wherein it becomes more and more challenging not to share things. And for those with poor critical-moment-decision-making skills AND a lack of extreme discipline, Twitter is the ultimate tool in accidental self-representation online. Self-censorship is a difficult thing, and a tool like Twitter makes it way too easy to accidentally tell a lot of people something you’d rather have kept to yourself (and yes, we can make the argument that people should just be better about how they Tweet, but that’s like blaming bullets for shooting deaths). Privacy impact: massive.
  • Foursquare, Gowalla, and other location-based services – Take Twitter (above), now apply it specifically to enable you to proactively tell the general public where you are at a given moment. This plus the free white pages is about the easiest way in history to explicitly tell thieves when your house will be unoccupied. Granted it’ll take a bit before the average criminal gets quite so sophisticated, but the mere concept of it should be giving you the willies. And if it doesn’t, check out Blippy. Privacy impact: so high it’s amazing anybody uses it.
  • Facebook – The grand-daddy of them all. Over 300 million people use Facebook today, one could call it an individual’s “hub” of personality on the Internet, not to mention the best place to buy fake farm animals and even throw sheep at each other – awesome. Now when Facebook first launched, it was for (and from) college kids only – us old folks couldn’t even see what crazy fun was ensuing inside the closed doors. They then opened it up for anyone to use, however all activities were “private” within Facebook – only your “friends” (a term the service has effectively destroyed) could see your activities. This notion of privacy is what got people really using Facebook to share personal moments en masse. Facebook then, and this is the worst part, threw that precedent out the window. Facebook not only shares your content, updates, photos, friend lists, and everything else in public, it does so with the entire world! Privacy impact: words don’t describe.

I want to make sure I explain my premise again properly, as by now I’m sure some people just think I’m a loony laggard who doesn’t “get it”. I get it. I get how we’ve been tricked. I see it very clearly. Let’s face it, Friendster was clearly the “gateway drug” which led us down the path to sharing crazy intimate details in the public eye, and thinking how it’s expected. Heck, it was an easy path to follow, and it played into so many people’s desires to feed egos – finally it could be done unilaterally! The Internet basically enabled the individual to be famous. And if it’s not clear, fame sells – and sells well. But it’s at a cost – simple google searches showed me information like prominent bloggers’ home addresses, birthdays, and other data that makes identity theft (an actual real crime) something so easy that a clever hacker could probably write a web program to do it automatically.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg even went so far as to say something to the equivalent of “that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years” (source). Guess what Mark – you might not be at the helms of a huge company had you made that choice. I hear a lot of industries afraid to make certain decisions because of the “slippery slope” they lead to. Well, it’s happened, and there’s really no one company to blame. Sure, each played their part, and some more aggressively/offensively than others, but let’s face it – we all got suckered in.

Please note and be aware – your privacy has been in violation for a long time. Public records show home ownership details, birth certificates, licenses, and much more. These have been available to the lowest bidder for quite a while. I view this as a different (albeit serious) issue, as none of these are opt-in privacy flaws. But just because someone can do things like dumpster dive to find your most recent credit cards statements does not by default imply that one should sign up to Blippy and voluntarily throw this information info the public eye. Further, I’ll completely acknowledge that I am just as guilty as many others for living in oversharing mode – but I guess the first step is being aware that there is a problem.

I read today (I’ve been working on this post for a while, so the timing is a little ironic coincidental) that people are starting to give up social networking for a variety of reasons – privacy being one of them. I don’t know if that’s necessary, but I think it’s certainly understandable. What I think is more important is for people to make certain choices about the public scrutiny they choose to live their lives under.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

  • Make sure you are personally aware of the various nuances and ramifications of each of the services you use (for example, did you know that your status updates on Facebook will, by default, be seen not only by your network, but by their networks as well? – here are some tips for improving your Facebook privacy settings – go do them immediately upon finishing this reading).
  • Think about how your choices to proactively share can impact not only yourself, but your family, coworkers, and friends. Take into consideration that you might think it’s adorable to put up a photo of your kid in some embarrassing moment now, but they might not appreciate it when they are an adult and it’s still on the Internet (and it will be)!
  • Don’t forget about the future you – who may not want to have the world know about some incident better left in private.
  • Finally, consider your real objectives. Do you actually care about Twitter followers? Does it matter to be the Mayor of your local Starbucks? Of course not, and there’s nothing wrong with having some fun and frivolity – but remember that it all comes with a cost. When you proactively give up free information, companies are profiting from it.

Your privacy is an asset. Take care of it.