Yeah, so we got the surprise of a lifetime Tuesday in the mail. A company (avoiding using the name to lower myself on the radar of anybody that might misue the information) whom we’d never heard of revealed to us that they: had our information on our main account (including demographic information like SSN, address, etc.) and a rather unscrupulous employee of theirs decided to sell over 2 million records of people like us to a data broker who in turn pushed that information off to 3rd party marketers.

The thing that baffled me was that someone had all this information that we’d never heard of. Literally, I didn’t know this company existed until they sent us this letter and our information existed on their computers for purposes I’m still trying to understand.

Well, we got the account number changed and we’re spending the next week or two connecting with people and businesses that need to know the new one.

What’s ironic, I think, is that I spent the morning yesterday speaking to a group of people on social networking. That, as educators, they had an opportunity to teach their students about apprpropriate uses of facebook by modeling it and that sharing some information online is not bad and allows them to connect with this student generation.

However, I believe that this current generation lives in a glass house; that information for them and communication is something that happens within the context of a larger community.

The problem comes though is that a weakness with that idea is the inability to be alone. In college some of the most valuable times for this extrovert were up at Cedar Campus, InterVarsity’s training center in Michigan, spending Sunday afternoon’s being quiet and alone–an activity that required that I not interact with people or technology.

I think this is where experience and a different viewpoint become valuable. Managing information online is becoming more of a dance. Reveal too little and you lose your ability to, in a very 21st century sort of way, “connect”. Reveal too much and you lose your identity.