For the past few posts I have been talking about various topics raised in a good article from the New York Times. Today will be my last look at the many different discussion points this article raises with regard to online and social media monitoring, the impact of these elements on individuals and companies and how society is changing because of the online world.

Here’s a quick question. Do you think that it is true that the younger an Internet user is the more likely he / she will be open online? If you said yes you are probably like most who make that assumption. Here is some info that might surprise you.

…two recent studies challenge the conventional wisdom that young people have no qualms about having their entire lives shared and preserved online forever. A University of California, Berkeley, study released in April found that large majorities of people between 18 and 22 said there should be laws that require Web sites to delete all stored information about individuals (88 percent) and that give people the right to know all the information Web sites know about them (62 percent) — percentages that mirrored the privacy views of older adults. A recent Pew study found that 18-to-29-year-olds are actually more concerned about their online profiles than older people are, vigilantly deleting unwanted posts, removing their names from tagged photos and censoring themselves as they share personal information, because they are coming to understand the dangers of oversharing.

To me this is good news because at least there appears to be some restraint in the age group where many feel that they don’t really care about what they put online.

So why this concern? Well, the ‘powers that be’ in the social media world like Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claim that the societal move is toward greater sharing and more transparency. How could he see things so differently than the study quoted above? That’s easy. He NEEDS as much transparency as possible to make money off of Facebook users. The more open they are the more targeted they are for advertisers. Facebook thrives on that.

Here’s the trouble with this openness and transparency flag that everyone with a monetary stake in this game is waving. They are not the ones that get hurt by this move to being more ‘open’. Alessandro Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, studies the behavioral economics of privacy and is looking into what he calls ‘decay time’. That is how long it takes for information positive and negative information to have impact on a person. Here are some of his findings

His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power. Research in behavioral psychology confirms that people pay more attention to bad rather than good information, and Acquisti says he fears that “20 years from now, if all of us have a skeleton on Facebook, people may not discount it because it was an error in our youth.”

The bottom line here is that you really need to keep your nose clean online. If you don’t, then the impact down the line could be troubling at best and devastating at worst. Imagine losing that job opportunity for an indiscretion committed over 10 years ago (other than being in jail or something just as serious).

The article goes into some possible ways to keep people from screwing themselves in their online life like the idea of data expiration dates, mechanisms to help create a time buffer between the creation of bad content and hitting the ‘share it now!’ button even the idea of reputation bankruptcy. All interesting but also none are in place right now which is when people are making their great mistakes

There is a lot to consider because of the ‘new world order’ of data dissemination and storage. This is not the same world that I grew up in and if I decide to let the Internet put a ‘rating’ on my reputation (like credit bureaus do for credit ratings) I am rolling the reputation dice. I can’t afford to do that, can you?

Learn more about how Trackur helps you get your online reputation in order. It could be the best move you made online in a long time.