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Omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod, y'all!

Did you hear?! Did you hear!? 100 million Facebook users' details were published online today by some kinda self-proclaimed internet security dude, who immediately blogged all about it and said we should all be reeeeeeellly reeeeeeeeeellllly scared!

And I am! I really am!

What happens to information once it's uploaded to The Internets is very, very scary.

Give you an example. Here I am, just sitting in front of my laptop, minding my own business, typing some words. These words. My words. My innermost, private thoughts.

But in a few minutes, lickety-split, I'm gonna do something pretty darned insane. 

I'm gonna click the button that says "Publish."

Well.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you what happens next, or how scary that is.

When I click "Publish," these precious, sacred words won't be private anymore. They'll  be public. (Which sort of sounds like...publish. You don't think those two words are related, do you? Huh.)

Yep. It's true.

Somebody might actually read this.

Holy Crap!

So, yeah. Today internet security dude had the temerity--the gall--the veritable chutzpah--to re-publish everything you could find yesterday on Facebook. 

I for one am terrified by the implications of that brazen act of cybermischief.

You see, right up until today, I was under the impression that the Internet was my own private diary and that nobody could search, find, see, read, or hear anything I published on it. 

Take, for example, this blog.

I've been laboring under the misconception all along that my OpenSalon blog was my own private sandbox protected by a Magic Internet Invisibility Spell. I never thought that anybody would ever actually read the damned thing. 

Go figure.

 I know, I know. Scary. Crazy, right?

It'd be like, uhm. Oh, I know.

Like if somebody put together a great big book full of all the phone numbers of people who haven't told the phone company they don't want their names in a big book full of phone numbers.

Nefarious stuff, man.

Dude. No, really. Pay attention here.

He took a snapshot of everything on Facebook. And then he showed the world the snapshot. Nobody can ever go back in time and undo it now. Nope. He's got all that information that people put out there on the Internet for the whole world to see, and now he's got it forever.

It'd be like, uhm. Like, oh, I know.

Like if a bunch of geeky High School journalism club kids got together and made a book full of pictures of everybody at various dances and ballgames and stuff, along with their headshots and their real names, and then not only printed hundreds of copies of the book to give to people in it, but put a copy of it in the school library. For all time.

Whoa.

The linked story provides a couple of quotes from security dude's blog that led me to wonder whether in fact said security dude is twelve years old. Here's just one: "Facebook helpfully informs you that "[a]nyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings" — but that doesn't help much anymore considering I already have them all (and you will too, when you download the torrent). Suckers!"

(Another quote in the story included an actual smiley emoticon. I did note with some measure of approval, however, that he apparently avoided ending the blog entry with "Neener neener neener!")

Oh and hey.

Guesswhat guesswhat guesswhat guesswhat guesswhat!?

He says he could do exactly the same thing any time he wants to. In fact, he's planning something bigger, he says. 

He could make up another file full of stuff that's already out there! Doesn't that make you tremble in your combat boots, soldier?

He could, for example:

• create a bot to download every single picture of cute puppies and kittens and gerbils and hamsters that are available on Flickr
• capture and preserve, for all time, every single low low price posted online today at every single small-town grocery store in North America 
• snatch the entire backlog of semi-literate ravings on the message boards at freerepublic.

Now I'm really scared.

You would be too, if you'd read this blog entry. But I'm sure you won't. Magic Internet Invisibility Spell at work.

Whew.