Lee & White

When we talk to people about the risks of publishing their own personal data on personal websites or social networking sites, their first reaction would usually be that they enjoy the fact that their friends or family members can see how they are and keep contact with them. They usually do not understand the implications of publishing on a world wide web without boundaries.

1. Search Engines

Search engines such as Google index and cache the information you publish on the web and keep this for an undetermined time on their servers. This can happen within seconds, so even accidentally publishing information and then -relatively- immediately removing it can already be too late, as the information can already be copied.

Any Internet-savvy user can use Google and other search engines to draw up a complete personal file of any person, including date of birth, address, mobile number, email address, work history, relatives and friends.

2. Aggregation

Blogging is very popular these days, and you can pen down your thoughts and feelings and share them with your friends.

What most people do not realise is that the standard settings of these blog sites (such as Blogger) are set in such a way that any posting is immediately sent (pinged) to aggregation sites (such as Feedburner), which aggregate part or complete articles and present them on their site. Some of these sites are also owned by or affiliated with search engine sites (resulting in the action above).

Furthermore, the aggregation is made using the initial post, so if you write a harsh article and then after consideration mellow it down, chances are great that the original article is not updated in the aggregation or search engine sites.

Most sites include a feature called RSS, which allows users to keep an eye on your site and get an alert when information is updated. For example, our site also publishes an RSS feed here.

This means that the lag time between publishing and reading is shortened even more, reducing your chance to correct mistakes.

3. Archiving

Certain websites keep a cache or archive of many sites on the Internet. Google is one example, another one is www.archive.org. Have a look at what Microsoft's website looked like in October 1996, or Google inJanuary 1999, or even November 1998.

Then have a look at your own information, and think what people in 2018 will think of this.