Social Media - Can Sharing the Wrong Information Work Against You?

With wave after wave of new trends, technologies, and gadgets hitting cyberspace and the blogosphere, it seems that cyberspace offers limitless opportunity to inject noise into the information stream. Since Twitter and Facebook took hold, it seems that everyday people have abandoned common sense in favor of cool new toys. Broadcasting details about our personal lives that no one in the world could possibly care about is a seemingly-inert practice that, while annoying, doesn't harm anything. Given that data can be collected in real time, however, even information of no substance can potentially be more dangerous than one might think.

Most of us have already heard about the obvious costs of posting the wrong information on the social networks. There's the infamous 2003 case of the Microsoft employee who was fired for his blog post. Or the more recent 2009 case where a Quebec woman found her sick leave terminated when she posted pictures of herself at a Chippendale club on Facebook.

Location-based marketing sites such as FourSquare and BrightKite offer users the ability to "check in" at different locations. This gave rise to a dubious feed aggregator called PleaseRobMe (a name that requires little explanation). The site, formed by privacy advocates, displayed a real-time feed of postings collected from location-sensitive sites about "recently empty homes" where people had disclosed their locations within the last few minutes.

The greater question: what other uses could ill-intentioned individuals make of your data that you voluntarily place into the public domain? The question isn't here to generate paranoia. The practical aspect of this is simple. Do you have a substantial purpose for what you are posting online? If not, you have more to lose than to gain.

Dave Baldwin is a writer who lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina.