The other day while I was hurriedly scoffing down my breakfast at uni, alternating between furiously puzzling out math questions and distracting myself with my shiny iPhone, I came across an interesting article on ABC News that really got me thinking. Yes, ABC News - curiously, while I no longer have a job with internet restrictions I still manage to always find myself at the ABC News homepage searching for clues as to the current state of depravity within the world. Mainly I theorise it's because it's the only news website without countless insufferable ads, it's easily laid out and if I want to find out what's going on in Finland, they make use of a rather excellent tagging system enabling me to find what I want to know with very minimal fuss. Without further ado - the article

The article is about a debate in the UK over the possibility of social networking being "exploited by extremists". Essentially, the Home Office is considering monitoring the use of sites like Facebook and Myspace in an attempt to see who's socialising with who, apparently without any interest as to the content of private conversations.

That's a bit of a stupid statement really. Logically speaking, if you're concerned about who someone is talking to you would be interested in the content of those conversations. Even the nastiest of nasty people have families, co-workers, actual friends, support workers and the like, whom they are perfectly entitled to engage in benign conversation with and who have nothing to do with any illicit activities said dodgy dude might be involved with. You'd really need to know the subject of the conversation to weed out these kind of innocuous social entanglements, otherwise you might accidentally accuse someone of being a terrorist associate based on the fact that they're the 'friend' or 'friend of a friend' of a person of allegedly dubious intentions. But that wasn't what I was thinking about.

A Liberal Democrat, Tom Brake, voiced his opinion; "Plans to monitor our phone and email records threaten to be the most expensive snooper's charter in history". I disagree. With the amount of personal and private information people seem to be very free about putting on Facebook or Myspace, the government doesn't really need to spend any money attempting to monitor people.

Seriously, just log onto Facebook and click through some friends of friend's pages. You'll be amazed at what you can learn. Phone numbers, personal addresses, email addresses, employment histories, schooling histories, names of friends, photos of everything they've ever done, their political alignment and religious ideologies, 25 fun facts, what they did ten years ago, five years ago and now, pictures of their houses and cars and babies, who their best matches are in a variety of quizzes, where they’ll be at any given time, where they’ve been and where they’re going and that's before you even start reading the comments people leave.

Once you get to the comments people write each other, you get a complete sense of who that person is, enough to make it reasonable that any intelligent person with a skill for disguises has a complete unending supply of people to impersonate. Levels of literacy, the things they place importance on (everyone knows that 'profiles' are all wank), how they treat their friends and family and whether or not they're a total dickweed or a decent person are all able to be easily discerned. You can even find out how they know certain people... "Y went to X school with Z", or "A dated B in high school", or "C and G worked together at S place".

I was a bit miffed when I first read the article and thought to myself "Invasion of privacy alert!" but then I realised that it's really not an invasion of privacy when people put the amount of shit that they do on their public profiles. Not only that, but anyone who knows how to use Google properly can search for anybody's name and likely find a few articles about whoever they are searching for. Newsletters their names might be mentioned in, sporting clubs and match/title results, university webpages, you name it. It's all out there for anyone to find.  Case in point - searching for my real name nets you three pages of results. Every single one of them pertains to me. If anyone decided to come looking for me, it wouldn't be terribly hard to find me.

So while I was eating that muffin and doing my maths homework (which, as it turns out, with proper application I am actually very good at) I came to the saddening realisation that there are no secrets left in this world. Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen.