Is There a Limit to Our PublicNess?

The Internet has had a disruptive impact on how we live, work and plan – and perhaps one of the most interesting is how a growing number of people are leading increasingly public lives.

We talk about where we’re located (Foursquare, Gowalla), what we’re doing (Twitter), who we’re with or going to be with (Facebook) and what we buy (Blippy). Since it’s so easy to be so public, the amount of information that people are willing to publicly share continues to expand.

The question is whether there’s a limit to how public we want our lives to be? How much is too much? Is there a point in which disclosing too much about who we are, what we’re thinking/doing and where we’re located becomes dangerous? Are we there yet?

While being public is becoming the “norm” for a growing number of people, this information is being monitored, track and analyzed in different ways. Some banks and insurance companies, for example, are using information that people disclose on social media sites to make credit and policy decisions. It’s food for thought the next time you want to tweet or do an update about having a huge hangover or you’re interesting in taking skydiving lessons.

I’m also surprised by how much information people disclose about where they’re located and where they are located. For example, lots of people have no qualms about telling the world that they’re heading out on vacation for a couple of weeks. If I were a social media-savvy break & enter specialist, I would have multiple Tweetdeck columns set up to monitor all of this “valuable” data. A few searches later, and they could quickly determine where someone lives, and then schedule jobs based on this “intelligence”.

Heck, even the CIA is getting into social media monitoring after buying a stake in Visible Technologies last year. Who needs to install wiretaps when people are happily volunteering lots of information about themselves via social media!

The problem is most people don’t think their “public-ness” is a problem because sharing with everyone is seen as being no different than talking to your next door neighbour when, in fact, it’s entirely different. Maybe I’m in the minority but at some point, people have to wake up to the fact there’s a downside to being so public and transparent.

Then, maybe people will think twice about telling the world everything and anything. Maybe people will think more about broadcasting to people that you really know (friends, family, etc.) rather than everyone in cyberspace. In many respects, the public disclosure pendulum has swung from one extreme to another. Who knows whether it will swing back but people should spend some time thinking about how much they are disclosing, and who’s seeing, reading and monitoring this information.

What do you think? Are we becoming too public?

More: For more thoughts on how we have given up our privacy, check out this post by CSO.