Pew Internet Report: Reputation Management and Social Media

A new Pew Internet report focuses upon privacy, social media, and managing your profile; have you Googled yourself lately (Icerocket has interesting blog returns)?

Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many Internet users, especially the young. While some Internet users are careful to project themselves online in a way that suits specific audiences, other Internet users embrace an open approach to sharing information about themselves and do not take steps to restrict what they share. -- Reputation Management & Social Media

This report follows an interesting post by the Distant Librarian earlier this week that featured links to a Facebook Privacy Scanner available from Reclaim Privacy.org.

Stale cookies

Today the Official Google Blog announced a new privacy practice - Cookies: Expiring Sooner to Improve Privacy.

"After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy." (Peter Fleischer, Google Blog, 7/16/07)

How much of this new policy is indeed intended to protect the privacy of users - as opposed to answering criticism regarding Googles practices - is still open to discussion.

See also: Big Brother Google and Is it OK That Google Owns Us?

Tags: Google Blog, Google & Privacy, Google Cookies