Sometimes I wonder about marketing messages.  The video below is targeted at “youth” according to the credits.  I watched it 3 times and while I think I understand what they are trying to get across, they did it in a very, very bizarre way.  Watch for yourself and decide if this increases your desire to be private.  For me it just increased my need to stay away from odd videos.

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Blogging is a recent Internet phenomenon, which can be classified in a variety of ways. Blogging could be as simple as someone posting an update of where they are going for the weekend, or just writing their thoughts in a stream of conscious manner. Blogging can be angry too; there are people who have a wide following that read their rebel blogs about everything from government to driving laws. Blogging is also a good way to keep people updated; consider the social networking giants MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter. MySpace and FaceBook both are used to provide an inside look into a person’s life directly from them, and also what they are doing. This is in the blog section you see; your friends could have anything written there. Twitter is just a more condensed form of blogging, making use of a minimal amount of characters to propagate a message to many people.

With blogging becoming such a popular and widely utilized pastime, people are beginning to see the security issues it represents. First of all, there is the possibility of someone tracking the blogger from his or her page, and maybe even posing as a friend (which isn’t hard to do online) to arrange a real life encounter. There is also the simple possibly that the blogger is just putting too much information out there. While they may talk about other things, blogs are often centered around friends and their activities together. Oftentimes you will see a blog that lucidly describes the place they are discussing, (sometimes even an address…) people involved in the event, and usually a picture attached of the person and their friends. This is everything and more than a criminal needs to find this person and rob, kidnap, or steal from them.

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With the advent of the social networking site, people spend more time online than ever before. Some people don’t even meet in person anymore, because it is more convenient to arrange a quick chat online. People load up their profiles with all sorts of personal information and pictures for the world to see. Privacy filters are virtually non-existent, and those that do exist are rendered useless by the public. Why only have “friends” view your profile when everyone who sends one message to you is instantly a “friend”? The truth is, these sites are terrible for people’s privacy, and people are just now waking up.

Germans and Germany in general are very cognizant about what goes up on the Internet, as they are often haunted by constant reminding of the Holocaust and the stigmas attached to it. Lately the German population has become suspect of the U.S. company FaceBook. They are convinced that FaceBook is completely disregarding their privacy rights and not securing all of their information.

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