We live in a very inter-connected world today, a world where more and more of our lives take place on the Internet. As a result, pieces of our lives, or at least breadcrumbs of where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to, are left on servers across the Internet. And to illustrate that point, let me relay a quick story from Gnomedex.

Danny Sullivan, from Search Engine Land, was one of the speakers at Gnomedex. Danny makes his living talking about search. And to illustrate just how much of our lives are online, he ran some tricks on the audience. He took a few attendees of the conference and called their cell phones. How did he do that? Well we went down the list of attendees for the conference, ran a search, and found their cell phone numbers. Once he had them on the line, he asked them questions like:

• How was your trip to [city]? (showing a vacation photo which was online)
• Do you like your the new deck you put in?
• Oh, is this your house? (showing a satellite view of their house from Google Maps)

Sullivan also showed some notable images from Google Street View, such as a guy going into an adult video store, or another guy getting into a fight at the scene of a car accident.

But, I can’t relay it as well as Sullivan himself, so here is the video of his presentation:

What Do Your Searches Say About You?

If you’re a woman having a hard time getting pregnant, you may go to Google and search for issues relating to pregnancy. Perhaps you search for other medical situations to seek diagnosis. Or, out of town on business and perhaps you search Google for something to entertain your adult desires when you’re away.

Everybody uses search engines on the Internet, and that makes search engines colossal collections of human thought where they have, in their logs, all kinds of info about you. With Google, they will even record your search history unless you turn it off. But, even if you do turn it off, the data is there in their log files. It doesn’t mean anybody is looking at it and they likely purge the data after some time anyway. But, servers record a lot of information about you.

Even here at PCMech, each person who visits this website is traceable somehow. We cannot tell any personal information about you, but I can tell what kind of computer you use and where you are located on the globe.

Is It Worth Worrying About?

The answer to this question comes down to personal decision, of course. It is a fact of life that this data is out there. And if you choose to participate in the new world of the Internet, including blogs, forums, photo galleries, search engines, etc…then you are leaving a data trail. There is no way around it.

What it comes down to is this: you can either choose to live in a cave somewhere or you can live in the world and have others know things about you.

Sullivan didn’t propose any solutions to this. He simply floated it as something to think about. Most of the people in that room (including myself) are bloggers and that means we leave quite a bit of data in the public arena. In my case, I’m not private about it. I am resigned to the fact that search engines probably see some things I might not want the public to see. There are also things about my life which do not go online and never will.

You will also notice that, while I do talk of my family sometimes online (and may even post a photo every now and then), it is not my focus. I do not talk about my daughter much and I am very selective about any photos of her I may put on the Internet. There are photos, for instance, of her first bath. Very cute pictures, but are the kinds of things I would never stick on the Internet. They should not be public, could be embarrassing for my daughter in the future, and could (worse) be a magnet for child predators.

So, it comes down to setting limits and doing what you’re comfortable with. And while I might make certain details of my life public (and I do), I do not presume to make that decision for somebody else, including my family.

Do you worry about the data trail you leave behind?

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