Digital Trail spreads its wings without your notice!

We put a lot of info about us on the web. It may be difficult to control this info. Every time we refer to a friend of ours, we are also enlarging their digital trail. It costs an awful lot of money to get your trail completely off the web. It has infact become a business now, there are specialists who can get your information completely removed from the web if you pay a price.

Some reasons why you must be careful about what information you put on the web:
1. There are some companies who trace you to your blogs, social Network profiles to know more about you and your credibility. Obviously, they wanna make sure they are hiring someone well worth the trouble.
2. Some insurance companies also track people on the web for various obvious reasons I need not elaborate here.
3. You can yourself come up with a few more points to add to this list.

You may say, “I have used high security on my networking profile, only my chosen friends can view my profile info.” But do you know that there is no way of stopping people from putting some malicious code in the applications that you add to your profile.

BBC has recently created a data miner application that could look just plain to people from outside, but inside when it is added to a profile, it mines info from the profile not only of that profile but also all other profiles attached to it. Guess where they tested this? Facebook! Yes, Facebook.

I agree that privacy is promised to us. I also know that we all sign an agreement that we will abide by the website terms of use, but not everyone is a good guy you see.

Should we now panic, should we get our profiles removed from these sites? Not really, but we ought to be very cautious of what we reveal on these sites. Beware! Private settings are not really private.