Why you should never post anything into Public Space.

A lot of people seem to think that you can get away with loading files into public space and that no one will see them until I send someone a link.

That’s WRONG!!

A couple of months ago, I pasted a Jpeg version of my resume on picasaweb.google.com and thought no one is going to see it until I send someone the link. My thinking was that there were millions (or billions) of pictures on Picasa and no one is going to be interested in my resume. More precisely, I couldn’t set permissions up because that would mean anyone wishing to view the resume would then have to register for a picasa account and have the right access rights before they accessed it.

I was wrong!

Check out this website called pipl.com . It’s really cool. You type in a first name and last name and it then searches through various social networks to locate people who fit the bill. For instance, I typed my name and the results were astounding:

There were at least 4 different Keith Rozarios, one of them even shared the same intials as me, KJR. Further scrolling down, I found that there was an actor named Keith Rozario who acted in a movie called marauders back in 1986 (this information was pulled from imdb). This was so cool.

Sorry guys, I booked http://keithrozario.com first :). Another Prime example on why you should book your domain right now before someone else takes it and starts sullying your good name.

But what really blew me away was this:

This was a link to my resume on picasa. Here for anyone to download. Interesting.

Just goes to show that whatever you post onto public space will be viewed by someone. Security through obscurity doesn’t work. You should protect your secure images/files online via password protection and share those passwords only with those that you wish to share those images/files with. The net is full of psychos and sharing personal data online is not a good choice…trust me.

On a lighter note, pipl really is cool as it does a full blown search for networks like facebook, linkedin and even friendster all from one interface. The website design could use a touchup but the concept is really cool. Try it out.

Adios for now!!