How to Take Control of Your Personal Information

The rise of social media means vigilance over your online information and reputation is more important than ever.

Go Google yourself.
No, that's not meant to be a disparagement. It's a wakeup call to be more aware of the lack of control you have over what's put online about you. Organizations have a lot of information about you and at least some of it is online, invading your privacy and shaping your reputation.
Two recent examples:
A few months ago Facebook began using facial-recognition technology to automatically suggest “tags” for people it identified in photos. When a user uploads a batch of photos, the website's servers attach friends' names to faces they can identify. The user then approves or disapproves each tag, or corrects them. When users are tagged, that information shows up in their friends' newsfeed, or “wall.”
This means that if one of your acquaintances posts photos of you from three years ago at an embarrassing drinkfest, odds are good you will be tagged in them. Facebook's default privacy setting is to share that information with all your friends, so it is then posted for all your friends to see that “Joe Smith was tagged in three photos,” along with thumbnail images and links to them.
You didn't post the photos. It was a long time ago. But because your friend posted them, they're now available for all your Facebook friends to see, including possibly your mother and your boss.
A Facebook acquaintance, an older gay man who is somewhat prominent in San Diego media, recently surfaced as tagged in my newsfeed. I clicked through to the photos and the tagged person was a woman, similar in appearance and possibly related, but also not my Facebook acquaintance. Still, it had me wondering for a few minutes if he was going through a gender change.
The other example, reported recently in Patch, is a new “mashup” provided on WhitePages.com that maps what is known as reverse lookup information. All you have to do is map a neighborhood and mouseover a house and it will tell you who lives there, along with phone numbers.
Reverse lookup information, in which you plug in a phone number or an address and get back the rest of the information associated with it, has been available on the Web for perhaps a decade. But seeing your house on a satellite map with your name, address and phone number on it seems a little creepy, particularly without your knowledge. The sources for this type of information go beyond the phone directory, and for one of my neighbors, their 8-year-old girl is listed as one of the home's occupants.

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