Matrix 2.0 - What the Web Says About YOU
“Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.” - Morpheus
Web 2.0, RSS, and the technologies which form the buzz around the second Internet bubble are fantastic. They’re far-reaching, powerful, democratic, and liberating. They’re also incredibly dangerous if you aren’t aware of what you are doing. I want to say something up front that I will repeat at the end.
When you turn on an Internet-connected device, you are an actor approaching the stage that is the world, and everyone is watching. Treat it as such.
Kristen Crusius, one of the next generation’s digerati, generously volunteered to allow me to demonstrate the power of Web 2.0 - and why it’s also the Matrix 2.0. A full participant in Web 2.0 reveals just about everything you need to know about them - and probably more than a few things you didn’t know about them. This post answers a question I had: does Web 2.0 let you know too much about someone?
We’re going to go on a journey together, and see just how much of one person’s life is exposed via Web 2.0 for the world to see.
UPDATED: This article was updated August 1, 2007.
All you need is an entry point into the grid, a place to start, and a place to record your findings. That place is Google.
http://www.google.com/search?q=kristen%20crusius
Immediately, we find a blog (#1 result), a LinkedIn profile (#3 result), a personal home page (#5 result) and a Twitter profile (#7 result). Fire up Google reader. Subscribe to the feeds for the blog and Twitter. Now you know what Kristen is doing on a moment to moment basis. You know what else is on her mind because you’re subscribed to her blog. Vox has photos. Vox Photos have RSS. Subscribe. Now you have images.
Ready to step it up? LinkedIn will tell you publicly where she works - and it’s up to date.
Kristen also goes by the online nickname Kroosh. Feed into Google.
Google says MySpace is the place for friends, and Kroosh has MySpace. MySpace also has demographic data to build a profile, rounding out more of the picture. Here’s what Kroosh says about herself on MySpace:
Female
21 years old
Brighton, Massachusetts
United States
Interests
Nifty gadgets, technology, The New England Revolution, dancing like a fool, food, mix tapes, rock climbing, ’salsa con queso’, collecting literature, eyes, seeing the clouds from the top instead of the bottom, photography, flying, darkroom developing, blogging, doooodles. and Ooooooooooooos.
Kroosh!’s Details
Status: Single
Here for: Networking, Friends
Orientation: Straight
Hometown: Northfield, CT
Body type: Average
Ethnicity: White / Caucasian
Zodiac Sign: Pisces
Smoke / Drink: No / Yes
Children: Someday
Education: In college
Kroosh!’s Schools
New England Institute Of Arts And Communication
Brookline,Massachusetts
Graduated: 2007
Degree: Bachelor’s Degree
Major: Interactive Media Design
Clubs: None currently
2004 to Present
Litchfield High School
Litchfield,Connecticut
Graduated: 2004
Student status: Alumni
Degree: High School Diploma
Clubs: Litchfield Hills Rowing Club
Kroosh!’s Companies
Exploit Boston
Boston, MA US
content producer, lime cutter extrodinare
webmonkey
Game Crazy
Arlington, US
Management
We know where Kristen goes to school, where she graduated from, her relationship status, and geographic locations of her job and home. We know her age, but not necessarily her birthdate. Wait, someone just posted a happy birthday notice on her MySpace profile and it’s timestamped. Now we have complete date of birth, too - which incidentally is enough to commit identity theft for some financial services.
Kroosh also has a Flickr page (result #10). Flickr has RSS. Subscribe. Did you know Flickr has geotagging of photos? Associate a Flickr photo with a listing on Craigslist or other geo-aware sites, and you can now draw a map of where photos are being taken, giving you a geographic idea of where a person is. Of course, if a person tells you, then you don’t need to ask the Matrix, like these twitters:
I’m in north stonington?. Nothing here but houses, pizza and a random amazing.net store..huh? 39 minutes ago from txt
Ok twitter, I’m off to the spa at Mohegan. Till tomorrow… 22 minutes ago from txt
Now we know what Kristen’s doing, what she’s seeing, what she’s taking photos of - including herself, where she is, and where she’ll be. To keep informed, we set up Google Alerts and Google Blogsearch alerts on her name and online nickname. Subscribe to those feeds. Technorati tells us similar things, but sometimes goes places Google does. Subscribe not only to her name, but the URLs you’ve found so far, and you now have a constellation, a cloud, of everything and everyone talking about her. Ex-boyfriend has a gripe about her? You’ll know. Wild party at her school with embarrassing photos? You’ll know. She’ll be at a certain address at a certain time? You’ll know.
What makes this different and more powerful than ever before is that by subscribing to all these RSS feeds, the machine gives us constant, always-watching updates about Kristen, no matter where she goes. As long as she’s using the machine, the machine tells us.
We could go on, but we won’t. This is more than enough. The reality is that Web 2.0 is in many ways Matrix 2.0, a vast collection of data and machines that knows more about you than any other human being, and in reality may know more about you than you do, because human memory is fallible and selective, whereas Google cached results and other services are fallible but inclusive. Once it is in the machine, it is nearly impossible to get it out.
I started out by saying “When you turn on an Internet-connected device, you are an actor approaching the stage that is the world, and everyone is watching. Treat it as such.” Once you set foot inside Matrix 2.0, the machine knows exactly what you tell it, and so does everyone else - and most of the time, you’re not aware of just what you’re telling it. Not a single thing in this blog post was found by any source other than publicly available information, and it’s enough that you can know more about Kristen Crusius than at any time previous.
The tools of Web 2.0 look so friendly, with their reflective pastel logos and rounded corners and RSS feeds for your convenience, but underneath that is an ocean of data about you - volunteered by you - that in aggregate tells someone - anyone - too much. Before you turn on the Internet device, put yourself in the role of an actor and tell the world only what you want the world to know about you - and that includes everyone in the world, friends and foes, allies and enemies, present and future employers, professors and students, upstanding citizens and online predators.
What are you telling the Matrix 2.0?
“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.”
A VERY powerful post indeed. One that I hope everyone takes the time to digest.
The green tint on everything was a nice touch.
March 13th, 2007 | #
Well demonstrated, Chris. Now that employment screenings often include searching facebook etc, people do need to take this stuff much more seriously.
That’s not to say abstain from participating, but rather be aware that online contexts are not necessarily discrete, and share information accordingly
March 13th, 2007 | #
[...] New post over at my work site, the Financial Aid Podcast. Let me know what you think in the comments over there. [...]
March 13th, 2007 | #
fascinating…. one of the reasons I think I have been a little leery of twitter…although I did take your advice and register all my “brand names’ with twitter….I have a passionate mission, and I am passionate about pursuing it via the internet… but I often feel a perhaps false sense of protection from my new, married, and oh so anonymous last name….hmmm…..how protected am I?
March 13th, 2007 | #
Great Post, Chris!
I strongly recommend Strengthsquest and Strengthsfinder for students and adults- they even have one for kids age 10 and above, to start to hone in on their natural talents and how to turn them into real super powers. It’ll surely be an integral part of the long awaited new media book club.
Whitney
March 13th, 2007 | #
Interesting read - thanks for putting it together. Now to figure out how to manipulate the Matrix…
March 13th, 2007 | #
An EXTREMELY informative post. It’s so easy to forget, “Once it is in the machine, it is nearly impossible to get it out.”
Thanks for the needed reminder.
March 13th, 2007 | #
A Fascinating and compelling post, if somewhat disturbing. The only way NOT to be visible is to abdicate from the web entirely.(Not a viable option for most)
Even in that event though, the integrated nodal system of the near future will still provide hundreds of entry points at which you will appear. The only thing left I guess, is to bring the data stream into absolute real-time and provide predictive pattern tracking software to analyze your likely locations when you’re not adverstising your status yorself.
Privacy is set to become a very expensive commodity! :)
March 13th, 2007 | #
I applaud you for the lucid and straight forward demonstration. I wrote a guide to taking responsibility for your image on my blog following discussions I facilitated at ECIS with dozen of deans of admissions (http://www.internationalcounselor.org/?p=106). Martin Walsh of Stanford writes in the recent edition of the International Educator on this theme: “…once information is posted to the web, the right to privacy is gone.” Furthermore, he indicates that deans “may need to good a candidate for admission to verify information or to learn more about an award given…”
I am also a BIG fan of strengthsquest. You can see my screencast to learn more about it: http://www.internationalcounselor.org/?p=91
March 13th, 2007 | #
Very true, and from a pessimist’s persepctive, this absolute lack of anonymity could be disturbing.
From the optimist’s point of view, this means that we now have even more ways to stay connected with the people we WANT to be connected with, and — like every other form of human interaction since cavemen were peering through the mists at each other — there are always ways to avoid the people you don’t want to see (or be seen by).
The real question, as mentioned above, is: How do we utilize (or game) the system?
March 14th, 2007 | #
[...] before you post personal information about yourself online, whether it be Twitter or elsewhere. It’s already really easy to get more information about you than you might realize, and once it… There’s no reason to give away more of your privacy than you need to. Posted in twitter, [...]
March 16th, 2007 | #
Very true Chris, and a very nice metaphore with Matrix 2.0. You see that it all is because of transperancy, where in the offline world you can keep certain things away from your surrounding world (eg, does your boss knows what your hobbies are, or what you ate last night?) we create in the online world a certain transperancy that gives the scenario you described.
Very true to be wise on how to use that.
August 1st, 2007 | #
Really good article! So is it a really bad idea to have your birth date public?
August 1st, 2007 | #
Excellent post! Too often users don’t realize how little snippets of information can be aggregated so easily into something that probably reveals more than they really want to have released!
August 1st, 2007 | #
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a friend for years regarding the issue of privacy. We’ve manage to convince one another that the world would be a much better place i *no one* had any. No, not very practical. But highly entertaining to speculate on.
I think there are two kinds of folks living in the world you describe — those of us who know it’s all available, and those that don’t. I’m in the first batch and fully understand the risks — and rewards — of living out loud. But so many others don’t, and get really scared when they find out how much they have shared.
But I think those folks are seeing their numbers dwindle. And maybe they are just “transitionary”. What happens when the next generation really understands it? How will they live their lives with fewer secrets? Can’t wait to find out!
E.
August 1st, 2007 | #
[...] piece I found about the dangers of the Internet social revolution and the willingness with which people [...]
August 2nd, 2007 | #
Talk about the Matrix–I flipped out when I saw this thing:
(http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/)
August 2nd, 2007 | #
[...] Read the article here. [...]
August 2nd, 2007 | #
[...] a Facebook account. You could feel the panic. Just how easy is it to find information? Check out Matrix 2.0-What the Web Says about you. College applications are stress filled enough without having to second guess whether [...]
August 7th, 2007 | #
[...] This article about Web 2.0 being “Matrix 2.0″ gives a cursory view of the lack of privacy on the internet, I’m going to show you how to dig deeper using myself as a subject. Before we begin, I want to say up front that I probably have a lot more personal data on the internet than the average person, I’ll talk about that shortly. [...]
August 10th, 2007 | #
[...] follows one from my good friend Phil801. After sending him a post Christopher Penn wrote on the Matrix 2.0 about what someone can easily find out about you, Phil did a search on himself and shares the [...]
August 15th, 2007 | #