I googled my CM Screenname

[greenergypsy]

I consider myself a fairly straightforward person. I will not say anything behind your back that I would not say to your face. I strive to know myself fairly well and be honest with myself and everyone I am connected to. I also strive to be a consiencious person and protect my privacy in both face to face situations and online.

I have internet search alerts on my real name, which, like almost everyone, is online somewhere. I have researched anything online that contains any personally identifiable details of who I am and what kind of life I lead.  I am a private citizen, and a public figure.  I can be found online. My name, date of birth, home address, place of employment, and many other details that would be useful to a stalker are readily available because I own a home which is registered with the county I live in, whose records are available online. I am a registered Business owner with my city, state and federal governments. The location, operation hours, telephone number and corporate affiliation are all public record.  I am not in a position to be invisible. So I take personal information security very seriously.  If you have very little information about me, you can research a tremendous amount of detailed information about my daily life on the internet.

Today I got my eyes opened to a hacker/stalkers mind.

I googled my CM Screenname.

I was not surprised to find CM listed.I was surprised it also linked Facebook, MySpace, AmericanIdol, Linkedin, my business website, my spiritual affiliations, my loved ones and best friends and their lives and photos, every website I used the same screenname to sign in to.  OOPS!

So I started looking into my security settings on all my websites to see what I was showing only to my sites, and what I was showing to the whole world.  I was quite surprised to find that my CM Journal posts were available for public viewing. I began to wonder what my customers were thinking when they read my posts.............

Then I got a little smarter and researched CM's privacy settings. If you have not read them, they are located here.

Tonight I will be reviewing the journal posts I have made available to the whole world. I will see how well I was true to myself and if I marked my private and personal posts as such.

ANYTHING you post online ANYONE can see.

The "correct" thing for me to do here would be to make this post anonymous. However, I have chosen to leave my screen name in case anyone wishes to notify me of anything I've posted they find offensive, TMI, etc. This is not a solicitation to poking around my profile or the web seeing what kind of life I lead. I just hope it serves as a wake up call to myself and others.

Bright Blessings!

[MSugarKane]

Jan. 16, 2010 at 8:25 AM

I wanted to know how to fix those settings! This was super helpful to me.  thank you so much!

[kellymsons]

Jan. 26, 2010 at 9:56 AM

That was an incredibly thought provoking post. Its something we should all have been considering anyway.

[SabrinaMBowen]

Feb. 22, 2010 at 4:12 PM

Why would you post something private online? That just doesn't make sense. You have to assume that if you type it on your computer or even say it out loud for that matter, that it can be and will be posted publicly or repeated at some point. I am not a private person and have nothing to hide from anyone, but if you choose to keep things private, you shouldn't be posting them online... Simple as that... Don't worry about privacy labels or buttons, just don't post it...