Privacy Issues

Guess what I just discovered yesterday.

I was on Friendster during work hours (yeah shoot me, but you're not qualified to, unless you're my boss) and suddenly had this funny idea. So I went to Yahoo! and searched for what I wanted, VOILA! I got the email add of a certain celebrity (whom, of course would not be convenient for me to mention here).

Get this, the celebrity in question actually had his/her (take a guess, I'm not even gonna disclose the gender of the person here, in case I get involved in privacy issues) email add plastered ALL OVER the Internet! And it's not even the record label's email, it's a PERSONAL one!

I can understand this person probably loves music so much that he/she wants to get as close to the fans as he/she possibly can. Okay, I'll just call this person AA, to save my typing trouble. Anyway, I think AA is only exposing itself (sorry, I address AA as a thing here) to danger.

I had this absurd idea running through my head (I think most of its fans had done this long ago). So I copied/pasted the poor email add into the Friendster search bar and pressed Enter. Was thinking AA couldn't possibly have an account there. But because I was feeling so damn bo liao, I did it anyway. Who has ever heard of a celebrity who dabbles with the horrendous zilch-privacy world of Friendster, right? Even if they do, they probably wouldn't be tracked down so easily.

2 seconds. The search returned me 1 result. The profile pic was still loading. The name was AA's alright. Probably another one of its hardcore fans using that nick, I thought. Okay, the pic finished loading and I saw that it was AA. Doesn't mean anything. I clicked on it and was linked to AA's profile page.

Holy Cow! I almost fell off my chair in the office! Nah, of course the page was set to private mode, all I could see was the name, location and hometown details. But that was enough. This could well be the real thing! But then again, it might be another fan making the whole thing look so mysterious.

Wait, but the email i searched for was AA's alright! So it couldn't be someone else's right? Even more astounding is the fact that my network is indirectly linked to AA! I'm linked to it through 2 other persons. Weird.

So the next thing I did was adding AA as friend. But of course I didn't expect AA to accept my invitation. It would be smart not to cos who knows what might leak out, right?

Anyways, if you are nice enough to go through my Friendster profile and stumble upon my humble blog and is reading this now, I guess you'd know what to do. You really shouldn't disclose your personal email to anyone except close friends. Especially not using it as your Friendster login. There are some extremely twisted freaks out there (like yours truly), you know.

Beware.