This online community phenomenon is catching up pretty quickly.  People are constantly putting their lives online, identity thieves and other criminal minded can very easily perform reconnaissance activities from the comfort of their homes before the unleashing their final attack.

Before the advent of social networking websites search engines were a source of wealth of information, especially Google, where all your online information if its spiders can crawl it, ends up in their databases and becomes Google “Property”.  Google has never disclosed about the retention period of this information.

So to track someone down via Google, one had to first understand the advanced Google search syntax and after that you were at their mercy.  Well, by the introduction of  SOCIAL NETWORKING sites, this whole idea of understanding search syntax andINTELLIGENTLY using it has become a way of the past.  Even the dumbest can figure out a lot about you via these SOCIAL NETWORKING sites.

Facebook’s terms and conditions state that the information you submit to their website becomes their property.  So you internet savvy user, who feels like an computer expert by spilling your guts to the internet are actually making it very easy for the various Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) very easy to eavsdrop on you as they please, they don;t need a special warrant of any kind to get to you information, which you have so willingly posted on the internet.

Google Docs, although free also allows you to place your documents for access from anywhere on the internet, same story as above goes here.

The next big thing on the internet is CLOUD COMPUTING, which is not much safe either.

So, always think twice before uploading any private and personal information on the internet, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING!