DIY detective work & online privacy

As I’m watching the first two seasons of “Mad Men” I can’t help but draw comparisons from that era (the ’60s) to our world today. The most striking difference is the characters’ attitude towards smoking and alcohol. Nearly every character in every scene smokes regardless of their gender, age or job. They drink hard liquor at morning meetings. Hell, there’s even a scene of a pregnant lady with a cigarette in one hand and martini in the other! It’s amazing how far we’ve come in the past 40 years.

One topic that hasn’t come up in the show yet is availability of data and protection of privacy. Seeing as I’m currently immersed in the 1960′s with “Mad Men”, my brain immediately thought of that era when I recently experimented with Google Latitude and other modern “communication” tools.

Example 1 – Catching a cheating husband

Imagine you’re in the 60′s and when doing your husband’s laundry you find some lipstick on his collar. Being a classy lady, you don’t just go up to him, throw the shirt in his face and kick him out of the house. No, you keep the shirt as evidence and on your next trip to the grocery store you pop by the local detective’s office. There, you speculate a lot about what your husband may be doing, you guess his exact whereabouts so that the detective could trail him and you wait for weeks to get any incriminating photos.

And today? With the help of Google and GPS, you have yourself a modern detective’s tool kit. And best of all, it’s all free!

If you’ve found your husband’s shirt smudged with lipstick in 2009, you’d either a) have a mini heart attack because you think he might be gay, b) think to yourself “what tacky woman would wear that colour?”, c) you’d throw the shirt in his face and kick him out of the house just as your 60′s counterpart would have or d) do some detective work before proceeding with a, b and c, in that order.

But where to start? Cell phones seem to be the first port of call and if browsing through his messages didn’t yield enough results, you can use the phone as a tracking device. Introducing Google Latitude. If you (or in this case your husband) have a GPS enabled phone, then Google Latitude can track his whereabouts and display the results to you in your web browser. All you need to do is ever the mobile number and then reply to a text message from that phone. After that, you log in to your Google account and voila! You can see where he is (or at least his phone) at all times. Twitter applications like TweetDeck make this even easier for mobile Twitter users. TweetDeck displays your location directly on your profile for all to see. No detective work needed!

Example 2 – Your online personality and the work place

Nothing you do online is ever 100% protected. Not from identify thieves, not from your friends and definitely not from your boss. In some cases you know this and in others you’d never realise it. Take both Twitter and Facebook. Both social networks default their privacy settings to “public”, thus making anything you write on either available to search engines. With Facebook, even if you set your profile to “private”, your latest wall post still comes up in Google results (Please note that if any of these policies changed and I got it wrong, I apologise. I’m writing from personal experience only, which may be outdated. Here’s an article on Facebook privacy that might help.)

Let’s say you slip and change your Facebook status to “Working at Telstra sucks ass,” your boss may see it and probably won’t react too well. Depending on what you say and in what context, your post could be grounds for disciplinary action or even dismissal. Or it’s the middle of the day and after a bad meeting you put your emotions on Twitter and say “People I work with are idiots.” Unless you set your privacy and notification settings correctly, you may not even know if any of the people in the room saw your post. Heck, they may even have an alert on their phone that tells them your comment immediately! Imagine that working environment going forward. Better yet, what if you’re a disgruntled ex-employee and you insult your former company in any way on a social network. It’s the same as if you stood up in the middle of the city and shouted your statement as loud as you could. That’s slander.

Example 3 – Identity theft

My blog is just one example of my personality online. If you Google me, you’ll find a whole lot more. Some of it I can control (like this blog, my Twitter timeline, or my LinkedIn profile) but others I can’t (articles by me published by third parties, articles mentioning me or even friends social networking profiles that mention me). It may take some time, but it’s not impossible to find out enough about me to do some harm. And if you think you’re safe, think again. Just Google yourself. …. And no, I won’t go into any more details here just in case .

The point – Know where you stand

Nothing online is 100% private. You have to be aware of your public persona online and take responsibility for any consequences. Be mindful that everything you put online can come back and bite you later, so be smart. You don’t need to hire a private detective nowadays to find out someone’s whereabouts or collect other information on them. A lot of it is public whether we like it or not. We might as well learn to live with it and take responsibility for everything we do online.