Deadly Status Updates

The Associated Press recently posted an article about an Israeli raid being called off when a soldier involved in the raid leaked information. He named the time and location on his Facebook status, saying they were "cleaning up" the village.

Currently, Facebook has over 400 million active users. That means one out of every seventeen people on the planet regularly checks it. Now, this blog post isn't another story about why you should be on Facebook because it exposes your company to one out of every seventeen people in the world. Instead, it's about how public your personal information is, not just your company's.

We've all heard stories about employees who talk bad about their jobs or their bosses in their status updates on Facebook, only to be fired the next day because a friended co-worker rats them out, or the employee forgot they were friended by their boss. What users don't typically think about is that their social media content is open to far more than just other users. In the case of the Israeli soldier, it was enemy intelligence.

There are entire sites dedicated to posting embarrassing, unintelligent photos, statuses, and comments from various social media sites. These sites try to keep anonymity by blurring out last names from comments and statuses as well as blurring eyes from photos, but if there are sites willing to jeopardize even a little bit of that anonymity, there are certainly sites that would offer full disclosure. It doesn't stop with social media either, even embarassing text messages can be submitted and posted online with an area code attached to them.

My point is, if you have any information surfing the air waves or cables there is no guarantee whatsoever that only your "friends" will be able to find it. What's worse, once it's out there it's there for good, and who knows who will see it? With one out of seventeen people on the planet checking Facebook, it could be found anywhere.

Does this mean you should cut yourself off from social media? Absolutely not. It's a great tool to keep in touch, collaborate, and promote yourself. Just keep in mind that if you can promote yourself, you can just as easily condemn yourself. While we may not like that nothing online is truly private, it's the world we live in and to ignore it (while it may not be as fatal as leaking military intelligence to the enemy) could have terrible consequences. Be careful with what you put online.