Reading the last week the digital version of El Mundo, the second newspaper with more circulation in Spain, I saw one blog about technology called "El Catalejo".The post of the day was focused on the opening of a new tool of search of Google after several months of practices. Now Google gives the possibility of the users of finding not only web pages, blogs or images, also comments in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed. You can see one example in this video.
The post discusses about the problem of publishing your personal comments in a search engine because, can a machine distingues between a joke and a private comment? Are my comments with my friends important in the search of other people? The author accuses the social media of not having a good privacy policy because one thing is that you can communicate via Twitter, in an open space, and another is that your comments appears in the screen of millions of users in Google.
After reading that, I wanted to try it. I searched "Real Madrid" in Google and I found several "tweets" about the match of yesterday against the Getafe:
I entered in Twitter and I wrote a comment about the topic, because I wanted to know if it is going to appear or not. This was the result, I was frigthtened, I am the first one in the list:
This experiment has thought to myself about if we are preparing to the social media (why are we frightened when Google publishes our comments and not when we have our profile in Facebook or Twitter opened to everybody?) and if we know the importance of our actions when we use them (why are worried when our name appears in Google and not for example in Facebook where all our data appear?)
Entradas
This is interesting. We have Twitter search incorporated into Google :) I am just wondering: does Google also show the tweets that are protected? As you may know Twitter does provide the option to protect your tweets and keep them private. It is a big issue if the answer to my question is “yes”.
ResponderEliminarOf course, when we put our data online and give up our privacy on sites like facebook or other social networks that are exposed to not only our comments and see photos of everyone but overtaking our personality. control of privacy and to say: It is sometimes important. We must not let anyone into our house, our life. Google applications are fine but need close monitoring.
ResponderEliminarWell! At least its good news for organisations. They will at least be able to see what we are saying about them on Twitter and other websites. This will help them to know what people think of their organisations and then come up with a communication campaign tailored towards addressing those issues.
ResponderEliminarOh gosh! Everything we do is forever recorded and searchable for anyone who wishes to look. On one hand organisations will be very happy to see what people are saying about them in every day life. On the other, it really makes the internet the least private place.
ResponderEliminarIn terms of understanding a joke or not, I don't think organisations will care, they will want to know about it. Whether they come across as a bad company or a good one is what they will want to know, and how people are talking about them.
It is really rather scary that even comments are searchable now.
You do have to wonder, what will be next?
Interesting experiment, María! It makes me think about how prepared are the people to use Internet. It seems to me that it’s underestimate and of course we will continue having security problems until we don't carefully understand it scope and how it actually works. From my point of view it is something related with the proper "socialization" (physical, face to face) so now probably we are in the "childhood of digital socialization".
ResponderEliminarYesterday emerged on the world news a problem with the security on the chat of facebook, so anybody could see the private conversations of their friends in real time, http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/video-major-facebook-security-hole-lets-you-view-your-friends-live-chats/
Internet, after all, is a virtual world and we need to understand its proper patterns.