You can't close down people

It is time to see social networking sites as just that. Networking sites. Says Archana Venkatraman
Two incidents earlier this week took the paranoia around networking tools to an absurd level. One was when MI6 chief Sir John Sawers's personal life became public when his wife innocently uploaded their holiday photographs to her Facebook account. The other was concerns expressed by UK intelligence agencies that Facebook and other social networking tools ruin the spy industry, as finding new recruits without an online trail has become nearly impossible.
In the first instance, Sawers faces a probe, and in the second, consultants are saying that having a Facebook profile is like "opening up a Pandora's box of online traceability that one can't ever truly close". The message from security experts is loud and clear - maintain a low profile at all times.
That means having no images in the public domain, or being associated with any person or organisation. What we need to understand is that while the latter is in people's control, the former is not. In today's internet age, it is hard to control information that is visible and searchable in the world wide web.
For instance, the MI6 chief was unaware of the availability of information while his wife did not consider the implications of her enthusiastic and seemingly harmless activity. Even if she had been careful with the security settings, his friends could have published the photographs and "tagged" friends' friends and so on, or he could have featured in other holidaymakers' pictures.
High profile officials must indeed have Facebook and Twitter accounts as information coming from them is fast, first hand and extremely useful. It also is important for the info pros of the future as references while documenting an event.
Instead of making them digital outcasts, they and their loved ones must be informed about the security aspects of these websites. More importantly, instead of controlling the prolific adoption of these inevitable sites, experts must advise search engines and those who run social networking sites to stop crawling through their pages for easy find-ability and to stop presenting a vast amount of information to random web search-ers.
It is the technology that has to become smarter with sensitive personal information, not people.