If the internet made information globally available, Google made it accessible…A few weeks back, someone ‘googled’ my real name and could have been able to piece together a considerable amount of my history – stuff like my secondary school and the year I left, my University, my father’s name and some of the work he’s done, my work history, comments I’d made on some blogs in my real name and some stuff I was rightly ashamed to be associated with – like the mug shot i uploaded to the Liverpool website’s worldwide fan database!

That got me thinking about the stuff I do online and just how, when I decide to go head to head with Hot Doug for the Nigerian Presidency in 2023, some smart kid could pull off stuff from Google to knock me out of the race. Now in addition to searching on Google, we can blog, read books, buy and sell, organize our own computers, travel the world, swap videos, organize, create and share documents, network on-line, store, share and edit pictures, talk and even pretend to be Italian business men from the comfort of our Ojuelegba boys quarters (with the connivance of Starcomms that is) for the ’19’ men! If stuff like Google Analytics can pull a lot of data about visitors to your site almost at an IP-based level, I wonder what the master database it is cross referencing can do… That’s a whole lot of power for one company to have methinks…….So I’ve started by deleting my Nigeria-Friends account, turned off the public listing I’ve got on Facebook, as well as deleted my PerfSpot and Hi5 accounts…. Wouldn’t want a boredom induced piece of indiscretion to cost me dear in future… Or maybe its all a part of life and we all just need to get on with it!

Ever ‘googled’ your real name? You just might find it therapeutic!

P.S. Thanks for all your thoughts on my last post… I REALLY am over it…..