Social Networking’s Invasion of Privacy Just Got a Whole Lot Messier

Today, computer software giant Microsoft announced that their latest version of MS-Office will integrate seamlessly with Facebook.

Previous versions of the world’s most popular set of applications – which include Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint – have allowed users to connect to LinkedIn using a plug-in called MS-Outlook Social Connector. The latest version of MS-Office not only has this plug-in built directly into the interface, it pulls far more information from Facebook than it did from LinkedIn.

From pulling Facebook photos into MS-Outlook, so now you’ll know what the other person you are emailing looks like, to revealing all their status updates, news feeds, even their wall posts – so you not only know what they like and are up too, but who their friends are, and what their friends like and are up too – all of this – and more is now publicly available to anyone you email using MS-Outlook, or any of the other MS-Office applications.

Cool sounding at first, but then think about all the personal information being shared. Do you really want your boss to see the drunken photos of you that you posted after celebrating your last birthday?

What if you are looking for work – do you want potential employers to see you vent off your frustrations about your current or past employer thanks to having access to your newsfeed and status updates?

Think you are very social network savvy, and you are extremely cautious about what you post on Facebook?

Doesn’t matter – if a friend posts something which you just might not want the whole world to know, too damn bad – because wall posts and news feeds are now shown directly in MS-Outlook.

So that video of you doing an air guitar rendition of Stairway to Heaven in your underwear that your girlfriend posted on her Facebook, could now be playing on a colleagues computer. Worse – that colleague can simply forward the email to everyone in your office so even your coworkers without Facebook accounts will see you dancing in your undies.

Social networking has come a long way in a very short time. It wasn’t all that long ago that unless you actually knew someone personally, you’d never know that person at all.

But thanks to the information powerhouse of the Internet, just type a name into a search engine, and you can see what they look like, who they work for, their kids names, the kind of car they drive, and even some of their silly photos from real-world social activities.

And thanks to Microsoft’s new and more direct integration of Facebook – the most popular social networking site – you don’t even have to search for the information. It’ll just appear right in your MS-Outlook inbox.

Not that social networking is all bad. Knowing more about a client may earn you brownie points and make your job easier.

If you discover that a hard to read client has just come back from a business trip in San Francisco, for example, you could use that as an opening to try and break the ice. Seeing photos of that client, with a beautiful woman wrapped around him while on that trip may prompt you to ask about his wife and their shared experiences on that trip, only to find out, that he didn’t take his wife on that “business” trip.

Uh-oh.

Awkward.

Thanks social networking!

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American Vice Presidential Candidate LinkedIn to Rescue Career

Only in America could a person striving for one of the highest positions in the country end up looking for work online.

Sarah Palin has posted her resume on LinkedIn – a social networking site with over 50 million people for professional networking and to look for jobs.

The former Alaskan governor’s profile says she is interested in: “Job inquiries, expertise requests, business deals, reference requests and getting back in touch.”

Maybe the last item on that list will prove the most challenging for the Am

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

erican politician, whose old fashioned values conflicted with her own real world.

When Palin was Alaska’s state governor, she was very outspoken about teen pregnancy – she banned condom vending machines in public high schools, claiming that it gave teenagers the wrong message. The only way, according to Palin at the time, to avoid teenage pregnancies, was to convince kids to abstain from sex.

Though that obviously didn’t work in Palin’s own family, her young 16-year-old daughter’s impending pregnancy, and what appeared to be a hastily put together shot-gun wedding for the poor young man who got the kid pregnant, stole the spotlight from Palin’s vice presidential campaign.

So “getting back in touch” for the former governor and American vice presidential candidate may be quite the challenge – who wants to associate with someone who publicly expresses one set of values, but lives another?

Granted, it isn’t Palin’s fault her daughter got knocked up, but it does show just how out of touch her own values and beliefs are with those of society.

Ironically, Palin’s running mate during the same American federal election, John McCain, joined LinkedIn during the campaign, to participate in a section of the site called “LinkedIn Answers.” This section allows participants to ask and get responses from professionals. McCain was answering questions about the campaign, politics, and other topics to promote his presidential footprint.

However, Palin hasn’t joined the social networking site to just provide advice – she’s looking for her next gig.

This raises an interesting issue for social networking sites – what happens when celebrities join the site to network with us regular folk?

Many celebrities are already on most of the popular Internet-based social networking sites – just do a search on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Myspace for your favorite singer, actor, politician, or sports hero and you are bound to find them.

For the most part, these online celebrity sightings are an arms-length kind of deal. The celebrity – or more likely someone who works for the celebrity – posts short, brief, updates promoting whatever that person is working on or appearing in. They very rarely – if ever – respond to people who message them. It is usually a one-way form of communications, where you get a quick summary of their latest news.

Image via Wikipedia

Sarah Palin didn’t join LinkedIn just to share advice or information with us non-famous types, she joined to network and connect with us normal types to forward her own career.

It’s like Johnny Depp, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, or even President Barack Obama posting their profiles online, with the hopes of actually connecting with non-famous faces to get a job.

Now Palin isn’t the most famous person out there – she’s not wh

Image via Wikipedia

at is often referred to as the so-called “A-List.” She’s not in the same category as Johnny Depp, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise or even President Barack Obama.

But she’s still a famous person, so how does she know that those who connect with her online are on the up and up? How does she know that out of all the nuts on the Internet – of which there are many – that the people attempting to connect with her online are who they claim to be, and that they have no intention of causing her harm?

Palin is risking more than her pride by taking out a virtual job-hunting profile online. She’s risking her life, and that of her family and friends.

One of the great things about the Internet is its ability to bring people closer together, from all walks of life and from anywhere around the world.

But when a person becomes famous – or maybe that’s infamous as in Palin’s case – you give up some of those freedoms, just to protect your well being and those close to you.

The Pope Mobile – a vehicle with a giant bullet-proof clear glass enclosure -- wasn’t created to encourage and allow everyone to reach out and talk to the highest of world religious leaders. It was created because of the few crazy nuts in society that could cause the Pope – and other famous people like him – harm.

American President Barack Obama doesn’t ride around in an armored vehicle (nicknamed “The Beast”) surrounded by an army of body guards just because it’s cool. He travels this way because his fame makes him a target.

Although you can’t shoot someone over the Internet – at least not yet – you can still inflict quite a bit of damage over the net. It is easy to steal someone’s identity, destroy a person’s reputation by posing as them, or even just use the information they are foolish enough to put online to track them down in the real-world and then kidnap, rape, or kill that person or someone close to that person.

There aren’t any Pope Mobiles or armored vehicles with complimentary armies of body guards for members of LinkedIn or any of the other online social networking sites.

Love her or loathe her, Sarah Palin is taking a big risk by posting her profile on LinkedIn.

She has the right to use these sites just as everybody else. Hell after her fall from grace during the last American federal election, she can use all the help she can get. But whether or not a famous person can achieve the same benefits from these online social networking sites safely, remains to be seen.

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Married Flirts Cheat While Social Networking

Regular readers of this blog no doubt follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

These social networking sites provide an invaluable way for people to stay current with their family, friends, business contacts, and personal interests.

I started using Twitter and Facebook earlier this year to prom

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

ote this blog. It is interesting to reflect on these social networking sites every so often, to see how they actually work.

Interesting study came out recently claiming there is a direct link between economic status and social network. The wealthiest and most prosperous of us are on LinkedIn, while those raking in the least amount of income use Myspace.
Facebook and Twitter were used by everyone else. Maybe it is about time I joined LinkedIn . . .

Regardless of what you make and what social networking sites you use, I’ve noticed an interesting, sad, but not surprising phenomenon on these social networking sites.

People use them to escape their personal problems – specifically, people in relationships engage in extremely flirtatious, if not downright sexually suggestive and borderline cheating, types of behavior.

To steal a phrase from American President Barack Obama – let us be clear – many use social networking sites to cheat on their partner.

While on Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook, many married women, some with kids, and some married to the same person for decades – will flirt directly with me – and other men. Naturally, many of these men – most of whom are also married, with kids, and in long-term relationships – will flirt back. I see the messages go back and forth – it’s hard NOT to read some of the highly sexually suggestive posts which appear almost immediately after the person typed them.

Image via CrunchBase

There are many people using these social networking sites like me, who aren’t married – but for those who are – which is the majority of those engaging in this form of online cheating – WOW – get a room!

I’ve seen “tweets” (instant posts on Twitter) about every sort of sexual activity imaginable – usually between two or more people who are married to anyone NOT present in the online dialogue.

Many women have sent me direct tweets, highly suggestive in nature – some directly outright telling me what they’d like to do with me. Going through my records – remember, whatever you post online, stays online forever – I’ve calculated about 75 percent of these flirtatious posts originated from married women, and more than half of those have one or more children – 64 percent to be precise.

I’m not a bad looking dude, though I’m certainly no Adonis – but out of the 150 tweets directly sent to me on average per day -- combining @jordansdaily and Direct Messages (DMs) – 75 of these are flirtatious messages from married women.

Now to be fair, I’m a professional writer that also happens to be somewhat zany, and highly imaginative. So at first when I started getting these messages, I’d send off some equally suggestive, wild post, which couldn’t ever possibly happen. I’d go off on a tangent, making insanely crazy stuff up as I went – I wa

Image via CrunchBase

s just joking around, letting my creative imagination take me and my online readers on a mental journey.

Little did I know I was fueling the fire of the sad, the lonely, and the desperate.

I check my online social networking sites every day, trying to limit my online stay to about an hour. Aside from spending all day at work sitting in front of a computer as reason enough to not want to spend all my free time at home sitting in front of one, psychologists and addiction experts tell us that an hour a day is more than enough time to enjoy the hobby, without it negatively impacting your life – and becoming a true addiction.

However, whenever I happen to check these online sites – again specifically Twitter – there these married women are. For those not on Twitter, the second you send out a response to someone, unless it is a private Direct Message (DM), everyone who is following you sees the response. Just like email, I go onto Twitter to respond to my messages, and in so doing, inadvertently alert all those married flirts that I’m online.

Literally within five-minutes or less of responding to just one or two tweets, on average I receive about five to ten new tweets from these married women.
Often I respond only somewhat joking – “you still here, you never leave” – because truthfully, some of them never have.
The online world provides an escape, a virtual world where they can forget about whatever is wrong in their real lives, and play with real people, who aren’t real to them. They get so involved in this artificial online world, it becomes the only world they want to be a part of, and so they avoid the real world at all costs.

Some of these women make no bones about their cheating ways – though they probably would never consider this cheating.

One brags about sending these flirtatious tweets while lying in bed, right next to her husband – she sends these messages from her mobile phone. She does this every night. Why her husband never asks her why she’s always texting from bed every night, or who with, probably indicates only part of the problem.

Another woman tells me she’s in the car, while her hubby drives. Another woman tells me she tweets from the kitchen on her laptop, while the husband watches his sports in the living room: “he’ll never get up, not until half-time,” she boasts as she discreetly hides in her kitchen.

If it’s not cheating, why hide? There shouldn’t be any guilt if you aren’t doing anything wrong. Though some of these women are tweeting while their husbands are right next to them – maybe they are flirting with other women online too?

These poor sad, lonely and desperate women. They really must be all of these things – and many more – else why would they seek out sexual attention from complete strangers, often while their husbands are right next to them?

If I was involved with someone and had urges to seek out others for intellectual, sexual, physical or other needs, I’d have a discussion with my partner – or just end the relationship.

It isn’t fair to the other person to constantly spend time away from that person, giving all the attention you should be more than interested in sharing with the person you are married too – instead of some stranger in another country, in some virtual online social networking site, who is really there online, but not really there in the real world. And being there in the real world is what really matters – no matter how popular social networking becomes.

Social networking sites are great for many things. Networking with colleagues, sharing your thoughts, opinions and ideas about the world (such as this blog), learning about new and interesting developments in the world around you, and even making new friends who may become great friends if you actually take the time to meet in the real world.

But social networking sites are also great at distracting us from our problems. They create virtual worlds where we can seemingly interact with others in ways we crave from those in our real lives, but just aren’t getting. And that’s really too bad, because it doesn’t solve the problems we have in the real world – it just makes them harder to confront and deal with.

And dealing with our issues in the real world is the only real way to solve them.

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