I think you’d have to be a fool to believe that the internet has any semblance of privacy to it. Oral language doesn’t stick in the air – there’s no permanence to it. Once you take those words and record them in a concrete state, no amount of burying can completely eliminate their existence. You just have to know where to look – or, in the internet’s case, Google.

This particular topic was one point of interest for this semester’s final Journalism assignment, where I looked at both the advantages and disadvantages of the internet as a social medium, and whether it can ever truly replace oral communication. It’s the sort of thing haughty men like myself talk about when sipping Cognac and cleaning my monocle by the fire. Riveting, indeed.

That being said, I thought it incredibly amusing to see a forum post the other day, where the original poster posed a simple question: stalk me. By any means necessary, we were given permission to dig up whatever info we could about this person, going simply by their user name, and info previously posted around the fora. I think the OP was surprised to find me rummaging through their trash a short time later.

OP: Your subscription to National Geographic is expiring soon. And those chips are high in trans-fats.

Joking aside, I was honestly surprised as to just how much info I was able to uncover. But a short time later, I had posted said user’s full name, age, location, school, program of study, likes, dislikes, and email. Apparently, he really likes robots, too. And I all I had to go off of was a totally unrelated forum handle.

By means of smart Googling, it becomes child’s play to find the most detailed of information for almost any given person. Once you have their name, and possibly their email, you instantly have access to all their hotspots, all their identities. Everything about them can be pieced together into a nice little package – which may come in handy if I choose to date them at a later time. Kidding?

This is all information that, when vocalized, seems innocuous enough – disposable, even. While we may forget names and birthdays, likes and dislikes , the Internet doesn’t.

It puts me in a particularly difficult situation. Based on both my own opinions, and my choice of career, I think it’s important to have a certain degree of transparency, both in-person, and on the internet. On forums, I don’t care much for obfuscating my personal information, because I’d ultimately like to encourage people to talk and communicate with me. This in itself is one of the internet’s greatest strengths.

But what about the information not necessarily supplied by me? A quick Google on my own name shows competitive Cross-Country running results dating back almost four years. While not particularly interesting information, it could have very well been something far more serious. This is where the area of internet security becomes hard to deal with, since it’s information that is beyond my control. And once it’s there, it’s not so easy to get off.

For the most part, I don’t mind sharing bits of my life with the internet, as long as it’s me that’s doing the sharing. But at the same time, I don’t want such information to be abused. Obviously, there’s if the cyber-stalking thread is any indication, this is an obvious area of concern.

Unless you’re a lady, that is – I’m single.