There are many different websites nowadays that ask you for your personal information. The vast majority of these websites are websites that are simply just looking for a way to keep track of their customers but even these websites have been known to give information out to some of their partners. Spam is illegal nowadays, but the word Spam applies to a very specific practice; namely the sending of unsolicited e-mails. If you opt in to a mailing list and the person that owns that list happens to give your information to another partner, that is in many cases considered illegal and because of that your online privacy is threatened almost right off the bad.
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This is also true for social networking sites. When you sign up for a social networking site, you are essentially giving them permission to broadcast all of your personal information. After all, why would you sign up for a website like MySpace or Facebook if you weren’t truly interested in giving away your personal information? Logically speaking, it does not make a whole lot of sense to sign up to network with other people and at the same time be hesitant about sharing details like your name and e-mail address with those same people. Using MySpace or other web 2.0 sites like Bebo really does necessitate giving up some of your online privacy.
Many people don’t want to give up their online privacy, yet many people also want to enjoy the fun and benefits of websites like Bebo, Facebook, Orkut and MySpace. So what is the middle ground here? The middle ground is simply this; you give out your really personal information only to people you have come to know well and trust. Use an e-mail address that is different from your primary one to avoid a lot of unsolicited e-mail and then at a later date you can give out your main one to the people you’ve come to know well. It’s a very good compromise and one that will allow you to enjoy what the net has to offer without sacrificing all of your online privacy to do so.