Carbon Footprint? Let’s not forget Our Digital One

A recent article published on AllThingsDigital  regarding Facebook and its new collaboration with the American political website Politico has led me to renew my hesitant stance on social media and the volumes of information it contains on the people that use it.

For those who don't have the time to read the link, the short version is that Facebook has given Politico, access to content sent in US Facebook users' private messages and comments. The entire process is automated ,with no human interaction, and it's claimed that the resultant data will be completely anonymous – but is that true?

This article gives a good indication as to why “anonymous” data might not always be as anonymous as claimed and on top of that is the question of ethics of sharing any information that has been marked as private.

But a wider question I would like to pose is, “Do we put too much of ourselves out there?”

With the adoption of social media into mass culture, it's now become acceptable, dare I say, almost a requirement for you to post as much about your life as possible online, lest you be ostracised from society for being an outsider refusing to conform or, even worse, for being seen as boring by your peers.

Yes, there are privacy options available, but many people are unaware of them or don’t take the time to consider the future ramifications of making so much personal information about themselves readily available, and so, they don’t they use these safeguards. Obviously in social networking sites, there will be information that you might want to privately share with friends and publicly share with other users, but this leads back to what inspired me to write this, which is that Facebook are (albeit partially) using private communications between users for an external project. So how much of what you mark as “private” will forever remain private?

There is of course, another side to social networking/marketing; the side that allows the quick spread of news and information; a side that allows companies and businesses to establish a digital presence in a world that’s shifting ever further into an online existence, and there's also a side that shares professional resources and information so that we all may become better and more informed at what we do and how we do it.

Ultimately the end result of how you use social media is down to you; you can post as much or as little as you like, but what I would suggest is that you often think about the bigger picture, that everything you post is stored and that at some point, someone, somewhere may just have a use for it.