By now, everyone knows that you should set your privacy settings on Facebook. No sense in ending up like another Kevin Colvin. If you’re going to post party pictures on the day you called in sick… at least do a better job of covering your tracks.

I don’t think Gen Y has an appreciation of the permanence of the internet. Once you upload a piece of your life — a blog post, a picture, a video of your cat dancing on YouTube — it’s online FOREVER. I’ve had a Facebook account for about 3 years now, and it only recently dawned on me that there are pictures of me that I’ll never be able to really delete, as they’re stored in a server farm, in a datacenter somewhere, backed up several times over several hard drives, housed in a building guarded with security and alarms. Mark Zuckerberg owns those pictures as much as I do.
Those Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Dear reader, we have probably never met…but you can write my obituary. All you need is the login information for the sites that I use.

Let’s say you got your hands on my Google login. You would learn a ridiculous amount of information about me:

• GMail: who I know and what we talk about
• Google Search: things I’ve thought about and looked for
• Google Maps: where I’ve been
• Google Calendar: a detailed list of what I’ve been doing in the past year, complete with date and location

You could also have the following if you accessed my Facebook:

• Wall and Messages: conversations with people I know
• Photos: evidence of what I’ve done, where I’ve been and with who
• Events: date and location of events I’ve attended (can cross-reference with Photos)
• Relationship Status: who I’ve been involved with, the type of relationship and for how long
• Personal info: birthday, interests, activities, education, work history

Combine my Facebook data with my Google data and forget the obituary, you have enough to write a small autobiography complete with pictures and memorable quotes from friends.

the girl Riot recently got me thinking about signing up for Twitter, and in the process, made me realize the following information about me could be publicly available:

• What I’m thinking
• What I just did
• Where I am
• What I am going to do

Google and Facebook already have an intimate detail of my life up to the present. Twitter kicks things into overdrive and brings strangers into this surreal fifth dimension by letting them inside my mind, as they can read about what I’m thinking about to the second.
Get Over Yourself, Dave
I was one of those people who were vehemently anti-Facebook when it first became available. Like all anti-Facebook people, I eventually learned that resistance was futile and got an account.

My capitulation was fortunate, as Facebook has tremendous value in my social life. I quickly got over the hesitation of posting pictures and writing messages that could be seen by everyone. Once I realized that no, Nigerian scammers weren’t going to somehow use that info to scam my bank account, and no, my body parts weren’t going to be secretly harvested while I was asleep, I became more comfortable using Facebook.

It’s a weird lesson Gen Y is learning. Trade in your privacy for really cool social toys. Sooner or later, there’ll be no such thing as a private life, and things that rely on mystery will be dead. I am a firm believer that blind dates and high school reunions will cease to exist.

Despite all this, I’m giving Twitter a shot. I figure that as long as I make sure my boss doesn’t see my tweets while I’m supposed to be home with the flu, I should be ok.