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I'll Be Watching You

Dear Readers,


I never thought I would use this song as a premise for a blog post, but alas, the idea came to mind and this was the very first song that came to mind. It fits very accurately with what I'm experiencing today.

Many of my friends have said that I know everyone. This is highly inaccurate. I only know half of everyone. Anyway, sometimes this leads me on a weird research chase online. I'll explain: on the feature "people you may know" on Facebook, sometimes there are people who show up who have about 30-40 mutual friends (sometimes more). In a situation like that, my mind automatically jumps to questions such as, "How am I not friends with this person? If we have so many friends in common, how have we never met?" The answer is rarely the same. Sometimes it is because one of us moves into a ward where the other lived before, so we have lots of friends in common from that place where we lived. Others are missionaries that I met once while in Chile. The friends we have in common are other missionaries or church members from Chile.

Anyway, these questions always lead me to "research" the person if I don't actually know them. Some people might call it stalking. I call it becoming informed. I will search the person's name on Google, check out their profile on Facebook (They almost always have one. I have only come across one who didn't), and sometimes they will have a blog. You would be surprised how much you can find out about a person online.

Why do I tell you all this? First thing is that I want to share the experience I had today. While perusing Twitter, I saw off to the side the normal feature of people I should follow. These people are based off of the tweets you favorite, people you already follow, and the people who your friends follow. It is similar to the Facebook "people you may know" feature. The difference between the two? I have no idea. Twitter must have a different algorithm for finding people who are suggested to follow. Today when I looked, there was a person who I have seen almost every time I get on in the first two suggestions. This might not seem like much until you consider that the list of suggestions to follow has hundreds of people on it and it cycles through that list to put up two or three people on your main home page. This person has appeared almost every time in those top two or three. In other words, this person who should have like a 0.5% chance of ending up on that main page every time has appeared multiple times in the past month. Because of this, I decided to start my research.

I came to find that this person and I have a lot in common. I'm not talking about our interests as much as the things we do. I found that this person has a blog with a very similar name to mine, they have traveled to almost the same places, and we participate in similar activities at our University. Finding this person on Facebook, I discovered only one mutual friend. Another normal website to check out is Pinterest. Sure enough, this person was also active there, having similar Pinterest boards to mine (Yes, I'm on Pinterest. Sue me).

The other reason I share all of this with you is to show you how careful we need to be while posting things online. It is very easy to take enough information about someone just by finding them online. Be sure to keep your things safe while you are online. Not to be creepy, but somebody will be watching you.

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