I’ve begun to realize how serious the very idea of privacy can be jeopardized because of the web. The web can be a pandora box that may profit malicious folks.

This blog post was triggered by an encounter that I will remember for a long time. Last week, I met, in a semi private, semi professional context, an entrepreneur, someone that shouldn’t have known anything about me but that basically knew everything about me before we even met.

He showed me:

- my CV and professional network through LinkedIn

- who I hang out with through Facebook

- ‘what I’m doing’ through Twitter (although my Twitter has become private since then)

- where I went, how I and my sybils look like through browsing my pictures on Flickr

- my private address thanks to a ‘Whois’-ization of Tech IT Easy

- what I think, how I think, through reading the blog posts I’ve published for 15 months

- what I bought and sold on different eCommerce platforms

- the authors I like, the books I read, the movies I watched, etc. on U.[Lik]

- the videos I published on various VOD platforms

- how I react through all the comments I left on many different blogs

- the articles I read on del.icio.us

…and a lot more public things that I promised I wouldn’t mention here. All I can say is that it was bloody (UK; in US, that would turn out to be ‘fucking’) scary.

The guy actually knew more about me than my own self.

Fortunately, his whole idea was about tackling such identity issues on the World Wide Web. The idea was brilliant, but as I told him: executing and establishing a strong market position will be tough. Anyways, the meeting couldn’t be more eye awakening.

Identity Management on the WWW is a very serious issue, a high stakes poker. I decided to save 2 hours to myself every week to brainstorm alone on this issue: what kind of information am I okay making public, what kind of information that I leave public today should I turn private tomorrow, how do I protect myself and those that I love from intrusions, etc.

This is a very serious issue. Probably one of the top three current challenges the Internet is facing.