You started with Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. You've Fickr'd, Flixster'd, Twitter'd, Tag'd and Yelp'd. You've StumbledUpon Orkut, then hung out in the Qzone, the MetaCafe and the BlackPlanet. You've Mixx'd it with Baboo, LinkedIn with Netlog, Hi5'd with Habbo, Bebo'd with Ning and Reddit on Vimeo. You've Digg'd, Mash'd, Scrib'd, Fark'd, Zynga'd and it has all been Del.icio.us. You've spent the last few years building your online presence, making friends, uploading, downloading, blogging, chatting and putting yourself out there. Millions and millions of connections, comments, links and photos. Social Media will continue to be the largest and fastest growing component of the Internet over the next few years.
But what do you do when you want to turn it all off? Or when that one seemingly harmless personal tidbit you put it into the public domain ended up somewhere you didn't expect? It's happening more and more frequently — users get bored, grow out of or get paranoid about social networks. As this first wave of social experimentation draws to a close, users are reviewing their profiles, changing their preferences and becoming more selective about where they go, what they do and what they say. They're realizing they've been tracked, spam'd, cookied, located and tagged, willingly or not. And although some sites make it easier than others to delete information, they are not in the de-friending business, nor do they ever plan to be. Even services like ReputationDefender, Removeyourname and Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, developed to help users eliminate their profiles, maintain privacy and reputations on the Web, can't beat the Waybackmachine — archiving the history of Internet content for all to access.
The fact is, all the data we so innocently share will continue to reside (and be tracked) somewhere on the Internet. Simply deactivating your account is not enough to erase your past. Once it's out there, our information is generally going to live somewhere on the Internet — in a search engine, on a website, in an archive — FOREVER.
Over the next year we will start seeing new rules and guidelines about the privacy and use of online information, impacting our trust in the brands we share with. The stakes for access to online information are going up. Just as people have willingly posted personal details to social networks, more and more companies and organizations are now putting critical and sensitive information in the cloud. With information from medical records and financial transactions to education and entertainment being stored through cloud-based apps (SaaS), people will start asking where it all lives and who can see it. In 2009 there were numerous incidents of brands providing governments, organizations and companies access to users' personal information. And we can't ignore that this voluntarily posted information is a marketing goldmine.
The consumers and businesses that use social media services will start demanding transparency, better security and more control over who can review their details. Information is currency, but it's also a liability. Brands will have to judiciously decide how to balance ethics and business objectives to ensure they remain the trusted destination for our insatiable desire to share. It seems that on the Internet, the promise of eternal life may not be as promising as it sounds.
