Your Facebook ‘friend’ may be a federal agent

[deadrats]

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/your-facebook-friend-may-be-a-federal-agent-says-report/

It’s smart to watch what you say, and smarter to watch what you say online, because you never know who might read it. In response to a Freedom of Information request (FOIA), the government released documents revealing that social networking sites are being heavily monitored. According to the report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, social sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr were targeted, as well as Wikipedia, Craigslist, many political commentary sites, and NPR, among others.

personally i think you have to be pretty stupid to accept friend requests from someone you don't know and you have to be even dumber to post anything to a publicly accessible site that implicates you in anything that may raise eyebrows.

furthermore, it's not just government agencies that monitor the above sites, private firms do the same thing, mining the net for information in determining whether or not a person should be hired, fired, sued, lawyers routinely look online for info on someone they are suing, there's even a company called "reputation defender" that actively monitors the web for negative content and tries to combat it as well as increase positive content about the client.

hell, years ago i typed my real name into google and was shocked to discover that there were sites that listed my home address, phone number, etc. in order to remove the content they charged a fee, something i felt was tantamount to extortion. they did however allow anyone to add listings and info for free.

i believe i currently live in 12 different states, 50 different municipalities, have dozens of different occupations, somewhere between 20 and 70 years of age and dozens of different phone numbers.

[Forum Troll]

You are actually considering paying someone to remove public informatio from their site?

[zzyzzx]

I found about 5 of me as well (and yes my real last name is about as rare as zzyzzx). What was interesting is that one of them is in a place I used to live, but not related to me.

[deadrats]

You are actually considering paying someone to remove public informatio from their site?

no, that's why i said i considered it tantamount to extortion and that's why i started a misinformation campaign to mask the real info with fake info.