Today in Educ504 the first portion of class was devoted to online footprints and how we can educate students on the importance of knowing your footprint. To begin my entry today I will start by giving my story of a recovering Internet troll. If you know me personally you would know that I am a pretty biased Michigan fan. So one night I ha the great idea, that was fueled by a great amount e-courage thanks due to online anonymity, to post a bunch of smack talk on a Michigan state sports message board, the red cedar message board. To give some back on this message board, it is perhaps the loosest moderated board for MSU sports. Well in the height of e-courage I posted a whole mess of little brother, salvation army Spartans and other inappropriate comments. Of course that caused a ruckus on the board, which ended up being a 15 page thread.
What I didn't realize is that while I was doing this someone on the board was googling my user name and finding all of my personal information. At the time I was registered with academia.org which sends you an email every time your name is googled. So that night I ended up with about ~50 email alerts that I was being googled by someone in the Lansing area. At the end of the night, this particular individual found my personal name (goodby username anonymity!), personal university email address, Facebook profile, google+ profile, posts I made when I was in high school on a marching band message board, my physical information, so basically everything. The person ended up cloning my university email address and sent me a creepy email from my own address.
So the moral of the story is don't be an idiot online. You never know when some creeper online is going is to E-stalk you and post your personal info. Thankfully the mod of RCMB deleted that thread. I definitely closed as many privacy loopholes I could find that night. When I am a teacher, I plan on creating a class Facebook page. I will tell my students my tale of moronicy, with the message DON'T BE AN IDIOT LIKE ME because it will come back to haunt you.
To end this update, I want to give a shootout to the new blogger app for iPhone. I am currently writing this update as I read the bus.
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