We’re big fans of TED and thankful they share the videos from their incredible roster of speakers.  This talk from Nicholas Christakis discusses the influence of  our vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. He tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.  After watching the video, we were left with two questions: what’s the influence of our own network? are we even aware of its influence on us?

What do you think? What’s the influence of your network?

Earlier this week, we shared a small social experiment – we were able to discover key details and specific information by browsing the social media profiles of four people we recently met at a local networking event.  The results surprised us and got us thinking more about how casual people tend to be in very public places online.

Are you careful about what you say in public places? Do you ever really know who you’re talking to at a party? Do you mind if people eavesdrop your conversations at Starbucks? Do you let people read your laptop screen while you sit on the airplane? You’re probably socially attuned to all of these and careful about information that you’re revealing when you’re interacting this way in the real world, but you think differently about privacy in the online world. People tend to have this inflated presumption of privacy and they’re less careful about what they reveal. If fact, your privacy expectations and behaviors may be altered if you begin to think about a reality analog to the different types of social situations that you’re encountering through social media. You would probably be surprised how much people can learn about you because of the way you’re treating the online world differently than you act in the real one.

Let’s look at real-world analogies of the most common social networking sites and see how it might make you think differently about your privacy expectations. When you interact with people on Facebook, think of it as how you might act at a wedding reception. You either know everyone there or you have met a lot of them or, at the very least, you trust that they’re ok because the bride and groom invited them there. So you can let your guard down a little bit, share pictures, even drink a little too much and say stupid stuff. But you don’t really know everyone there, do you? You can’t be sure that everybody there was invited to the wedding. So you can’t completely trust everyone there, but on Facebook you pour your heart and personal information out on the table for everybody to sort through it.

If Facebook is a wedding reception, then Twitter is neighborhood bar on a Thursday night. You know a couple of people there, maybe even some good friends, but you have to assume everything you do and say in that bar might be heard by anybody. And you have no idea who those people are or if you can trust them. And who is the creepy guy that’s hanging around and listening to everything you have to say? You might reveal some personal things to your friends, but other people are listening.

If Twitter is a neighborhood bar, then social sites like Chatroulette or adults in MySpace are a shady nightclub downtown. You can’t really trust anything you hear or see there, but you might go there to let loose and have fun sometimes. Or maybe you just go there for bands that you like. You’re definitely going to see a different crowd at that nightclub then you might at the wedding reception last weekend, so you probably are going to put your guard up a little bit. You definitely can’t trust much of anything you see or hear there, and there might even be illegal things around. Plus, nightclubs never seem to stay open for very long.

If you don’t go to bars, then LinkedIn is much like your last professional networking meeting. You go to those types of events to meet like-minded people and to make contacts for business development, job searching or to just grow your network. You have casual and professional conversations with people and hand out business cards, but you don’t normally walk around handing out resumes. But that’s what you do on LinkedIn, right? Except on LinkedIn, the whole world can read all of those details, not just the self-selective group at your networking event. And again, these are people that are a step above strangers off the street, but you’re still not going to reveal tons of personal details to them until you get to know them, or when you run into them at a wedding.

If people thought about these real-world situations a bit when they are interacting socially in the online world, perhaps they would reveal a little bit less. Would you walk in a bar and tell everyone all of that?

If you’re on social media, guess what? You reveal more than you know.

The debate on privacy in the social space took another huge leap this past week. The Wall Street Journal’s ran an in-depth, investigative series titled, “What They Know.”  The eye-pooping, jaw-dropping insights in the series (here, here and it continues here) left little doubt that your digital footprint is easier to track and identify than you might realize. But The Wall Street Journal has a big staff, time to investigate, and an editorial directive to find the story.

What could a person like me find out about, say, some people they met at recent networking events?

From a recent handful of business cards I gathered at a networking event, I poked around on social networking sites to see just what people reveal about them to the rest of the world – without cookies, spyware, or other data-gathering tricks. This was a simple search to see just how much I could learn about four people.  What’s surprising is that I found a lot of details that I’m not certain these four folks know just how much they’ve put out there. Among the details, I learned:

• where they went to college
• where they went to high school
• how old they are
• where they live
• where they were born
• what nationality they are
• what religion they are
• everywhere they’ve ever worked
• how many kids they have (I even got to see photos and videos)
• what their spouses do for a living
• who they voted for in recent elections
• what their primary hobbies are
• what movies they had recently seen
• what bands/music they like
• what books they’ve read in recent months
• what restaurants they’ve been to in the last month
• and where they’re traveling to right now

Remember, this was just me, looking at public info they’ve posted on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others. 

So what are you opening revealing about yourself? Perhaps more than you know.