Invasion of Privacy?

I just realized how dangerous it is to put up pictures or even write on my own blog on the internet. Nothing is private. The most dangerous things are links that you may have created without knowing. These links can further appear anywhere on the internet and expose everything of yours.

I'd created a Flickr account after my Bali trip. Main reason was to store some of those not-so-personal photos. I've been there - keeping photos on the hard drive and then without warning your hard drive goes crazy and you lose it all. Or keeping them in a CD but keep forgetting where you've placed the CD. So Flickr it seems was something that would solve my problem. Plus if I ever needed to share these photos, I could just redirect the person to my Flickr URL. But somehow, using Flickr isn't that easy after all. They've got all sorts of setups and I think I've keyed in too much information. Even my blogname is published on the internet! And somehow when you search for certain words on Google (I'm not telling which words), out comes my pictures and my Flickr account details. I think I've been busted worldwide!

So, I've been chastised for invading people's privacy recently because I have pictures of people who mostly are unknown to me on my Flickr account. What's more, I just realized that some details that I would have preferred remained private have been shown on my Flickr profile. That finally made me look through the whole Flickr account, trying to change my details but unfortunately it's too late and for some unknown reasons Flickr would not allow you to change some details that have been keyed in even though it was wrongly keyed in.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that no one has managed to view my Flickr profile and people that I do not want reading my blog posts have not found my blog!

The one thing that I've learnt for sure : Do not keep anything that you wish to remain private anywhere on the internet. You wouldn't know when it shows up number 1 on the search engines and you do not know which scarecrow out there have dug and found your deep dark secrets no matter how private you've thought it is. Nothing on the internet is unsearchable.