So I came into work this morning and shortly after I had settled in at my desk, my coworker starts calling for me in a panicked voice.
I went to his desk, and apparently a friend of his had alerted him to some of his personal information on a website. Not just any personal information either. Information about his neighbourhood, people in his house, income, age, birthday, interests, you name it. Of course, being me, I went and looked myself up.
What I found just about made my heart skip a beat. The website in question, www.spokeo.com, spiders social networking sites, blogs, and any other repository of public information and aggregates it. This is just plain scary people!

Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books,

Got a Rand McNally Handy? Because that's what you are going to need if you want to adjust your privacy settings!
You may or may not have read my rant on Google Buzz, but as a webmaster for a security company - I take security and privacy issues reasonably seriously. For that very reason, I am about to vent a bit about Facebook.
Now, anyone who knows me, knows my detest for Google and Facebook - yet I still use them. Some might call me a conformist. Some might even call me a hypocrite. I do not like to think of myself this way, I just use it as a method of staying connected to friends and family; on the other hand - as a webmaster, it would be silly for me not to exploit the features of each in order to further the reach of the company I work for.
Anyone who is anyone has