What is Too Much Information on Facebook?

According to an article that I read, 30 billion discrete pieces of information are shared on Facebook each month. That's a lot of information. When does all that become TMI (too much information)?

You can find a lot of my basic personal information on Facebook, such as my employer, my educational background, my hometown and my latest status updates. I know that advertisers can use this to send me targeted marketing, but that doesn't bother me. Advertising is just information. You can tune it out if you want to. I also don't worry about revealing too much personal information on Facebook because so much of my personal information is already available online.

If you go to the following websites:
www.anywho.com
www.stsr.org
www.texasbar.com
www.google.com/earth

you can find my home address and phone number, my cell phone number, my photo, my state bar number, where I went to law school and even a photo of my home. You just have to know where to look. Could someone take this information and try to steal my identity? Possibly, but it would be difficult without my social security number and mother's maiden name, which are not available online.

I guard against identity theft by monitoring my bank account and credit card statements on a regular basis. The only time I have ever had my credit compromised was through conventional means; a clerk at Jack in the Box kept my card after making a purchase. Discover's fraud prevention department flagged the suspicious transactions within about a day. The only thing that I lost was the time it took to file a police report.

However, I am careful not to post anything that would come back to haunt me. There have been stories of people losing their job or even being arrested based on their Facebook posts. I don't post anything unflattering about my employer on Facebook or anywhere else (although as firm webmaster I strive to add as much positive content as I can on the firm's website). Were I to do something really stupid, I would not brag about it on Facebook.

As a general rule, I try not to post anything on Facebook that I would be embarassed for my mother to see. If you go through my photos, you may find one picture of me drinking, but it was just a glass of wine at a high school reunion. I don't use profanity. The most revealing information I post is on my blog, which feeds into Facebook. This increases my readership from about 10 to as many as 20 or 30. While I reveal a lot of my opinions, I try to write in a careful, reasoned way that is consistent with what I want my public persona to be. Sometimes I will venture out a bit and write something satirical or just plain silly (for example, yesterday I posted the German translation of "I have sauerkraut in my lederhosen," which is a line from the movie Top Secret). I use Facebook to communicate what I want to be known about me to my Facebook friends and the world at large. However, I always keep in mind that anyone could be reading what I post.