Sunday, September 20, 2009 by Val
From the reading on anonymity, of the participants, Noor, wrote personal details on her personal webpage, but quickly took it down when she realised that it could be read by anyone. This is probably a perception that I think a lot of us had when we first started using the internet. Personally two or three years ago, I would not mind posting any pictures or personal information on my public mySpace page for example, but I am more careful about what I put out there, knowing that this information is easily accessed by anyone, especially with the sophistication of the search engines we have now. For example, there are many cases and studies done that have shown that many employers check details about a prospective employee online and base their decision to hire on what they “discover” about the individual. This goes for other things such as commenting or blogging anonymously don’t necessarily guarantee anonymity, as in the recent case of a model successfully suing Google to release the identity of a blogger who was defaming her (src). This goes to show that there are always ways to get around the system to expose details that were supposed to remain private.