18X Public Service Announcement
 

Thinking of joining Special Forces?

Want to earn the honor of wearing that Green Beret?

Then do yourself a favor, remove your MySpace.com and Facebook.com web pages.

Don’t want to or don’t care?

Fine.

But do not expect to ever be selected for any covert or clandestine missions, period. (It ain’t going to happen when millions already know your face and name.)

Oh, and those classified counter-terrorist units people whisper about. Forget it, not a snowball's chance in hell of you joining after posting your face and name all over the internet.

You had a web page and now removed it, you might still be able to join…but forget the classified missions or covert unit assignments. Again, it ain’t going to happen.

You do understand how Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc use the "archive mode" to save all your information, right?

We do…and our enemies do, too! http://www.archive.org/index.php

Just type in Professionalsoldiers.com right after the http:// on this web page:

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Your MySpace.com and Facebook.com web pages will be on the internet for decades to come and you’ll continue to wonder, "Why didn’t I get selected for some of those classified missions?"

You can bet that every time one of you place your face on a web page and you state you just signed up to be an 18X, some hostile foreign intelligence service just made a file on you.

HOIS = hostile foreign intelligence service http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf (Do a google search on "hostile foreign intelligence service")

You don’t have to believe me; you’ll know when you’re not selected to go on certain missions or refused to join some units.

OK, you’ve been warned and remember, "Life is tough but it’s tougher when you’re stupid."

This has been a Team Sergeant 18X public service announcement.

This is a serious issue and I hope you younger guys heed this warning.

As a principal, I've suspended and expelled students over their MySpace, Facebook and IM misbehavior. We have a company that does a web search on any faculty applicant which can lead to them not being offered a contract.

Colleges and universities have specialists who search the WWW (MySpace and Facebook in particular) before deciding upon offering students enrollment and expel students for web misbehavior.

My wife is the West Team Leader (everything west of the Mississippi River) for a Fortune Top 500 company, and she has had to fire employess and reject exceptionally qualified candidates for web-issues because the company does WWW searches on all potential hires and periodically on its employees.

And for anybody looking for employment with any organizatioin requiring an upper level security clearance, this is an even GREATER issue.

REMEMBER - the WWW is a public domain!

TS is 100% correct. :lifter

Richard's $.02 :munchin

TS and Richard are Spot on.

If you want to serve and be the best at our chosen profession be a Quiet Professional not a My Space Idiot. Our most effective Soldiers were not the ones fighting down at Ricks but those that stayed in the shadows and did the missions that no one else could and moved on with out any fan fare.

My 2 cents

sports statistics
 

I have heeded the warnings posted on this sticky and have removed content from the internet, my facebook profile. My question pertains to other information available on the internet. I am a college athlete and it is NCAA regulation that statistics be recorded for all games and players and that the information be posted on the college's website for verification of participation and eligibility issues. When I google my name these stats come up, no pictures just my name and stats from that game. Could this encourage a negative effect on my future endeavors i.e. SFAS and once on a team? Any information is appreciated.
Thanks,
rm1249

In todays world you can not be totally erased. That info will not hurt. Personal data is out there IE: Phone books, local Gov info, accounts, etc. The intent of this thread/Sticky is to make people aware that things like My-Space, Face-Book, etc are not pluses. For safety and future employment do not get caught up in the networking that many subscribe to.

Roger that. Thank you.

Here is a little help from Google. I have not tried this route, so I can't give you a warm fuzzy that it will work..

Clarify
 

Just to clarify, am I correct to say that the security goal here is to try to mitigate any public reference that combines ones name or photo with SF.

Yes?

Yup, I don't care what your wife says, you're a smart guy.;)

My wife formally requests that you stop calling her to ask her opinon of me. :D

S

Website to remove personal info
 

http://www.squidoo.com/personalInformation

Here is a website I found that gives directions on how to attempt to remove your personal info from certain websites on the net.

The impact of web content, especially if you're a self-professed comedian, cannot be understated in this environment. An investigator that did my "bring-up" recently told me that is now the first thing they check, then credit report. IMO there is entirely too much open source info available - you active guys know, this ain't your grandaddy's war.

Don't forget about the "Wayback Machine": http://www.archive.org/web/web.php.
Once your info is out, it's extremely hard to erase.

Regarding facebook/myspace: some things are outside your direct control like friends and family posting pics of you and 'tagging' them to include your name. You should consider asking them to not post pics of you, or at least not pics that id you clearly. If you explain why, they should understand and comply.

- Just my $.02

FYI Facebook is Forever
 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,494064,00.html

Facebook Membership May Be Forever
Monday , February 16, 2009

Once a Facebook member, always a member.

The Consumerist blog noticed Sunday that the social-networking giant had quietly made a change to its user Terms of Service (TOS) on Feb. 4.

Facebook now declares that it has a perpetual license to use anything you post to your own Facebook page — even if you terminate your account.

Here's the licensing part of the legalese, which sounds bad enough:

"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof."

In other words, while it doesn't actually own your photos, scribblings and status updates — you do — Facebook can do whatever it wants with it, whenever it wants, in order to promote itself or create or sell ads.

Theoretically, it can even "license" a picture of your kids for use in a third party's ad campaign.

Most of that has been part of the Facebook Terms of Service for a while. After all, without user-generated content, Facebook would be nothing.

What's been removed is this: "If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however (sic) you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content."

And what's been added is this: "The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service" — after which follows a list of most of the sections on the Terms of Service page.

So even if you decide Facebook isn't for you, the site can still use anything you posted. It's all been archived.

"I'm done with Facebook," declared blogger Ed Champion upon learning of the TOS changes.

He seemed more annoyed at the older blanket license than the new never-say-die part of the legalese — ironic considering that if he'd deleted his account before Feb. 4 his account really would have been gone for good.

A Facebook representative told the Chicago Tribune that the Web site would soon issue a response to Consumerist's posting.

Boy am I glad I got out when I did, months ago when this thread was originally posted. Thanks to TS for the thread and all for the helpful information.

This just popped up on Facebook

S

According to the blog, the reason for the TOS change was to make explicit their legal right to retain, for example, messages that you have sent to other people. It would be pretty silly if they had to delete all messages from you if you left.

However, people (rightly) protested the Orwellian wording, so now they've reverted while they search for a less totalitarian way to phrase it.

This topic has come up on just about all IT service TOS's..

The provider has to make back-ups and archives of customer data,, all of it.. Which in turn creates bazillions of entries. This in turn makes it almost impossible to manage individual transactions..

Net Net,, It's a big CYA,, they need to keep the info so you can recover,, but the costs and activities involved are their responsibility to maintain. They just want to be able to keep the customer happy,, and not have to get everyones permission every day they do redundant data recovery back-up..

Lawyers are the ones that contrive the wording,, with-out thinking about the semantics and sentence readability..

Wouldn't it be possible for these corporations to simply specify that the infinite retention of data is for internal use and not for public release? That would calm those of us who value privacy (or, at least, it would calm me).

Or would that not work for some reason? I'm a mathematician, Jim, not a lawyer.

Facebook has apparently backed-off of the TOS modification due to the surge. of customer comments...

That being said...I still fail to see the attraction to those types of social networking sites.

****************************
Facebook 'withdraws' data changes
The founder of Facebook says the social network will return to its previous terms of service regarding user data.

In a blog post Mark Zuckerberg said the move was temporary "while we resolve the issues that people have raised".

Users had complained after new terms of service seemed to suggest Facebook would retain personal data even if someone deleted their account.

Originally defending the changes, Mr Zuckerberg had said it was to better reflect how people used the site.

He had said the changes were made to ensure that if a user deleted his or her account any comments or messages he or she had left on a friend's Facebook page would not also disappear.

Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7896309.stm

Blog article from the BBC Technology Editor http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technolog...g_growing.html

I would say that this temporary reprieve represents an excellent opportunity to get your ID, face, and personal info off of an internet website which has already indicated that they have a desire to retain the rights to everything you have posted, and to use it for whatever purpose they wish.

If you are an SF soldier, or want to be one, you may not want this info on the net or archived for use by whoever they might give or sell access to in the future.

If you are the family member or significant other of a soldier, you might want to consider how an enemy might be able to use the info against you.

I understand that some people just don't care, and in that case, drive on with whatever plan you have.

Best of luck.

TR

Amen! I have talked to wives and girlfriends about this until I am blue in the face, but it seems without a directive from the COC, they don't care :rolleyes:

Peekyou.com
 

I recently deleted my facebook and myspace accounts. In addition, I have also been Googling my name to find other sites might have information about me. I found this site to be very disturbing. Peekyou.com. It had a picture of me at the beach and also has accounts with all my immediate family and what cities they live in. I have been looking for a way to delete this internet created account. Please inform.

Beans

In my years contracting at the world's largest tech companies, I can tell you this: even the biggest three-letter-named companies in the world don't have their shit together. And despite what their TOS says, and despite their best intentions, data leaks out, be it by accident, intrusion, etc. So the only good policy is this: do not trust ANY entity with your personal data unless it's data you wouldn't mind seeing printed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

WRT having already posted your info on sites: consider conducting a formal disinformation campaign. Enter a birthday, but the wrong one. List the wrong college and high school. Do that on a couple sites. Upload random pics of people from the internet. Create a homepage somewhere, link to it in your social networking profiles, and then track who goes to that web page. Examine the web logs; you may be surprised where your visitors come from. Basically, create your own personal honeypot. You get the idea.

Additional Site Info
 

This looks like the best place for this post - admin please move if I'm wrong.

Reading this today got me thinking about my info on the net and after using the peekyou site mentioned above I hit peoplefinders.com. Scary how much info is available - anyone interested here's a link to the page on how to be removed from their database.

http://www.peoplefinders.com/help/ar...topic=privacy4

I'm in the process of removing years of content from sites like Internet Archive and let me tell y'all, it's no easy task. I'm getting to the point that all searches for my name just turn up other people and soon there will be no trace of my face. I'm glad I got on this! Also for those with Facebook accounts, make sure your privacy settings are maxed out and don't allow your profile to be indexed by search engines... or just follow the above advice and get rid of it.

Thanks for the heads up on removing all this stuff.

School Newspapers
 

Looks like some post-college adults are finding out "what happens at college stays at college" ain't true and are trying to change history.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/05...ollege-papers/

mylife.com
 

I recently got an email saying someone has added me as a friend on a social networking site, of which I am not a member. Apparently this site creates profiles for people by gathering info from the web. Mylife.com has a photo of me and probably more information that I cannot see. Is anyone else familiar with this site, it seems like I cannot delete my information without becoming a member, which costs $30. Anyone know a work around for mylife.com or other similar sites?
thanks,
rm1249

Unless you are a member you "cannot" view any pictures on this website or view anyone's profile. Just sign off and try.

It ain't this website their getting their information from.....

If the info was taken from this website (like your intro) I will go after them, unless you posted an intro somewhere else. What is written on this website is "owned" by us and none other.

By "this site" I think he meant the site that his friend listed him on, not PS.com.

TR

Russian Firm Buys a Stake in Facebook

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Published: May 26, 2009

A Russian investment firm, Digital Sky Technologies, has invested $200 million in the social networking company Facebook in return for a 1.96 percent stake, the two companies said Tuesday....

Digital Sky Technologies is a prominent Internet investor in Russia and Europe, where it owns stakes in Web companies that account for 70 percent of all page views on the Russian-speaking Internet, according to the firm.

Its portfolio companies include two large social networks, Forticom and vKontakte, and a Russian Web portal, Mail.ru....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/te...gl3lf5i9Ow6D/g

$100M = 1%! Holy crap! :eek:

Richard's $.02 :munchin

That is correct, thanks for the clarification TR.

I will post results if and when I am able to remove the info.

Thanks,
rm1249

Would this hold true 10 years down the road? I've had an account for about two years on Facebook. This doesn't sound promising.

Once something goes up on the net, it is out there forever.

The best you can do now is to attempt some damage control.

TR

I best get started then. Correct me if I am wrong, but are you saying that whenever I updated my profile (status, added a picture, etc) that a file was created, freezing that exact "frame" of data onto a file?

Do you think it would be better to just delete my account, or should I take away information, wait a bit, and then delete?

Sometimes I wish I was born in the '70s.

1) Yes

2) Delete the account, as we have told countless others.

3) Why? There are people from my generation that have no idea what personal security is and even many who do blow it off...

Crip

You plan on having plastic surgery? Or was this just a stupid question?

Team Sergeant

At the risk of rehashing the point of this thread:

Yes, there are archives of old internet data, available on the internet. (Shocking, I know.)

Even without that: Right-click, Save. A person who later removes data from the internet can't do anything about an enemy's local files.