Jennifer Porter is a little freaked out.
The 17-year-old is hunkered over a sheaf of papers scattered across a spotty Tim Hortons table in Ajax, Ont., one hand flipping pages, the other twirling an oversized blue earring. She brushes an errant lock of sandy blonde hair away from her face, looks up and giggles nervously. "That's kind of creepy," she says.
Indeed.
What she's looking at is quite the biography — everything from her cellphone number, home address and a map to her work (she's a lifeguard). All of it has been furnished by the man sitting in front of her — a man she's never met.
If you knew Ms. Porter, you'd probably be surprised at her lack of common sense.
She is leaving her home in the Toronto suburb for Queen's university in Kingston, Ont. in a few days to study biomechanical engineering. She's already packed her Nirvana CDs and her tenor sax, and no doubt her earthy good looks will have the boys stealing second glances in the library. She's articulate and quick-witted (if perhaps a tad innocent); in an era of Gossip Girl and The Hills, Ms. Porter reads Sylvia Plath and John Irving.
She probably never missed curfew and was the neighbourhood's favourite babysitter.
And yet there she sits with myriad details of her life before her, furnished by me, a Globe and Mail reporter, who found Ms. Porter's profile on Facebook and then reconstructed her life using nothing but freely available websites, such as Google Maps and Canada411.com.
Aside from knowing where she lives, where she works and where she will soon rest her head, our investigation also turned up her home and cellphone numbers, when she's turning 18 and that her boyfriend has already left to go back to the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont.
Oh, and pictures, too. Pictures of Ms. Porter from her recent trip to the Rogers Cup tennis tournament, a few of her with her boyfriend at the July 7 John Mayer concert in Toronto and others of her and her friends relaxing in a hot tub.
She's shocked that someone she has never met could learn this much about her just from the information she posted on Facebook.
"It's funny because when you called, I was having dinner with my boyfriend. He asked who it was and I said I had no clue but he got my cellphone number off Facebook," she said.
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- A 24-year-old Calgary woman posts her cellphone number, e-mail address, and the name of the Kelowna motel where she and three of her friends will spend a June weekend partying. In addition to nicknaming the event the "Erotic Party," the women joke about finding "some hot men to buy us dinner and drinks."
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Canadians are embracing social media sites at a breakneck pace. According to the most recent data from comScore Inc., nearly 17 million Canadians have a Facebook profile, 4.5 million are on MySpace, 14.5 million visit YouTube every month, 3.6 million upload photos to the sharing site Flickr.com. Social networkers use these resources to help shape their identity, essentially branding themselves and broadcasting their public image around the world.
But the exposure comes with a price.
While our digital footprint expands, privacy erodes. More and more, social networkers who are not obsessively careful face the prospect of identity theft, inadvertently marring their own reputation or even inviting the threat of physical harm. As the dangers broaden so too do the reactions: provincial and federal governments are taking the lead in educating users and probing whether social networks are really doing all they can to protect privacy.
While all of these social networking sites offer varying degrees of security and privacy protection — such as restricting who can view certain parts or the entirety of their profile — many users leave the drapes wide open. Whether it's by ignorance or simply a willingness to trust their private details to the public, they leave their photos, their blog postings and their personal information freely available for anyone to discover.
