Who's Looking In My Drawers?

There is a huge irony in the fears about privacy and identity theft and the rush to pose on the social networking sites of myspace, facebook, tagworld.

In the media, you read thousands of stories about people having their personal data stolen and the actions that major corporations are taking at the same time to get people to sign up with them while promising protection (uumm, sounds like a Mafia come-on).

Do you really want to bank online? Have a portable electronic wallet? Share your personal data? Sign up for massive online storage sites for photos and documents?

And at the same time, ensure that absolutely no one else has access to your personal vault of life, love, money and the pursuit of happiness.

Well, heck yes. (But what about those Citigroup commercials where the voices of thieves come out of the bodies of their victims?)

Most online-active adults over 35 years old want it both ways.

But what about those under-35? Social networking is booming. Murdoch pays a fortune for myspace. Facebook will eventually be sold. Tagworld is a start-up by serial entrepreneurs looking for a payday. YouTube (your face, your life, your antics) is bought by Google. They are waving their online underwear like flag signals on a 18th century Admiral's battleship. If you can decipher it, you will learn everything.

Do those people who sign anyway their offline lives for an online network really care about privacy and security? Maybe not because they don't have anything really stealable? Except who they are.

That poor page who was victimised by Mark Foley was outed by a persistent blogger because of an online data error.

So let's see how do we reconcile social networking with privacy and security with theft.

Maybe the only safe place to live is in Second Life. Or never put yourself online.