After reading the article Establish and Maintain Your Online Identity it became very clear to me how different is the world that we live in today from for example a year or two ago. The concerns over the internet privacy started emerging sometime in 2007, and till this day the one side of the coin that got the most informational coverage was How to protect our accounts on the internet through various privacy settings.
The article above truly is an eye opener, for it talks about the real life issue over an online identity that is applicable in the modern professional world. Today we absolutely must shapen up our online presence before someone else does it for us in a not-necessary-favorable manner and not necessary by a human (search algorithms.)
Photo credit, University of Texas Libraries.
Underestimating personal branding and identity management these days can either help in getting or cost one a job. Your resume printed may be a representation of your working skills in your eyes but it is not really representative of who you are for a potential employer.
Employers look through LinkedIn to match facts and get a sense of who you are through the information you've listed yourself such as skills and hobbies, and the information that is there by your connections. And and it is equally not wise to either not have a LinkedIn profile at all or to have an outdated one.
On the other hand, potential or current employers may search for you, and your Facebook pops up. And if your settings have a loop, others from who you may wish, can have a peak at what you do during your off work time. And if you don't filter your public timeline activity, it can become crucial in your career.
"The public interest is not always the same as the national interest"
- Edward Snowden, TED talk.
I cannot agree more. There are multiple occasions in the history where both interests were clashed.
"We shouldn't be criminalizing journalism", said E. Snowden. And while I don't believe what he did what journalism, I don't think he is a traitor either. I do think Snowden is living in the idealized world, where everyone's cooperation could be mutually beneficial. The world, where the government doesn't spy on its citizens, and the citizens in their turn support the government and act as a whole.
It is like the argument between bicyclists and pedestrians: bicyclists say pedestrians cross the bicycle lane at all times, and pedestrians say, bicyclists ride the red lights. If only both sides agreed on following the rules, there would be no accidents.
However, this idealized world doesn't and cannot exist. For that there are always people seeking to enrich at a someone else's account. Therefore, accepting the fact that some of my (and everyone else's) personal data is being tracked by the government, gives me a hope that in case of emergency, i can rely on the government to fight for my rights and security. I could be wrong as well knowing that i grey up in a completely different environment, and some fundamental rights protected by the U.S. constitution are foreign to me.
"Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore." by Mat Honan opened my eyes on various different issues regarding my online privacy and safety. It came down as a shock, how easy it is to get an access to one's online accounts and pass by the security questions. I caught myself on a thought that many of things that could clue an unwanted perpetrator to my passwords can be easily found online. M. Honan described the step-by-step process of breaking into an account with such ease that it is scary, terrifying. And while a lot (and M. Honan himself) suggested to not panic (because everything can be broken into) but take the basic precautions and not to be stupid by using such passwords as "password1," I am very concerned still. Even though my online presence isn't of much significance.
I found an article on this tech web site that explains how to protect Google Drive documents and going to do just that.
"According to computer giant IBM, 2.5 exabytes - that's 2.5 billion gigabytes (GB) - of data was generated every day in 2012. ", says the BBC article of March 3, 2014 Big Data: Are you ready for blast-off?
And Mashable offers an approximate break down on how much data is being produced per medium channel.
Impressive number - 100 hours of video data are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
It is really hard to cut through a clutter of information and find exactly what you are looking for.
Curating digital data became a hot topic a few years ago with rising demands on quality information in a timely manner. Finding the rights points as important for the educational purposes as in professional environment. The problem of sorting and extracting important data points is big and concerns and reflects on different search engines and people behind them.
Just like that in September 2008 another search engine launched called DuckDuckGo whose core idea lies in protecting searchers' privacy by not attaching "cookies" and therefore avoiding the filtered and personalized search results. DuckDuckGo swears to use the most reliable and accurate sources of information hence allowing users to extract the answers for their search inquires easier and without being influenced my there previous search quires as does Google search.
Google Search has a special order where results of search are based on a priority page rank called a "PageRank". The pages in Google Search are being ranked according to their popularity. Therefore the results of a search inquiry can be biased. However, Google offers many options for customized search based on time frame, region and many other characteristics.
In January this year Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia was granted accessto public posts made on Facebook in CIS states and Turkey (countries where Yandex officially operates). The only search engine which was granted similar access before is Microsoft’s Bing according to the Itar - Tass article "Yandex can now search for Facebook posts" of January 14, 2014. That means that Yandex and Bing have an access to more data in those regions and potentially are more accurate filters.
Still, the filtering options made available by different search engines are not enough to substantiate the search inquires the way the results reflect the exact thought process behind searching.
I cannot agree more with entrepreneur and curator Steve Rosenbaum, who in his speech about online curation said, "We need to change the way we interact with information" and "We need more organized data and thoughtful filters."
The demand on finding a way to demonstrate the best search query results in a timely and effective manner led to emerging of multiple data curating tools that help to do just that.
While doing a research for this post I've stumbled upon the "Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List" article on Content Marketing Forum that provides the list of such tools available to users today.
1. Apple has introduced an extra step in securing your information on the icloud after the security was breached, and your private information leaked online. #BBC #Tech #Apple
2. 5 New Social-Media Platforms Worth a Look according to the Entrepreneur
3. The “Check-in” is the phenomenon that never happened
4. 7 Emerging Social Networks To Watch In 2014 according to the #AmericanExpress
5. Sometime your tweets are alive even if you aren't. #JoanRivers #Twitter
