There are lots of people concerned about how freely personal information is available at the moment. Fears in the UK particularly have been heightened by the crazy loss of 25 MILLION! People’s personal information in one of the most farcical losses of personal data ever.

Fortunately I am not a parent (to the best of my knowledge) and have never had to apply for any child benefits. However, it does highlight the need for securing your personal information as much as possible. Even though the government can lose it without a trace, it is still important that we all take steps to ensure that we do what we can to keep this information secure.

I was reading a report on the BBC today about how young people are placing too much personal information on their Social Media pages, be it MySpace, Bebo, Facebook or whichever other one of the multitudes of sites that are available.

I must admit, I have a public MySpace page (which I wont link to now, you don’t want to read about the music and films I have in my collection – far too long winded) and if I am entirely honest, I really don’t have a clue how much personal information is on there. I do know from the deluge that I received at the time, that people who are my “friends” (which is primarily bands I like that I want up to date info about tours) receive a notice of upcoming birthdays – but it’s not directly listed on the page.

However in the race to collect more and more friends in these places, it would be very easy to accept some friend requests from people who are fishing for personal information and thus give them access to the info that is only available to your friends

It also said that the current young generation are putting potential future careers at risk by publicly publishing information that would be potentially detrimental to their chances of securing a role. 71% of 14-21 year olds questioned said that they didn’t want colleges or employers to perform a web search about them due to concerns about the information available.

Social media opens up so many different ways to communicate in a public environment that you should think about the information that you put up.

There are many closed methods of communication, such as the various Instant Messenger programs that you can use to talk privately, so maybe anything that could be used against you that you need to communicate to others should be sent to them only. People certainly need to be aware of what they have left online, can be accessible to many more people than it has been specifically directed to.

Ultimately, as one of my colleagues succinctly put it “don’t put any information on the internet that you wouldn’t tell everyone in the pub” – although perhaps that doesn’t apply to the future career aspects of the report – keep the pub stories out of the workplace!