Oh geeze.

I just read a story on TechCrunch that has commenters going wild over a new allegation that Valleyweg placed on Twitter.  The allegation is that Twitter is sharing our personal information with a government body.  Biz Stone denies it but in all reality, who cares?

The idea that the government has access to DMs and the like is not news, not scary or not anything to be worked up about. In fact, Twitter shouldn’t have to even comment on this regardless of whether they shared info or not.

Why?

Well, let’s see. The government has access to everything. They can freeze bank accounts in a moment’s notice, show up at your door and seize assets, find your long-lost relative that even you don’t know about, etc., etc. To make a big deal out of the government having access to our DMs is absurd.

Here’s my rule of thumb. Don’t put anything into a DM that you would care about the government reading. If you are plotting a ploy to overhaul a country, don’t do it via Twitter. In fact, don’t do it online at all. (That’s extreme, hopefully you get the point).

I get that people are all about their privacy and such but then they get on Facebook and Twitter and pretty soon, there isn’t much that a common person can’t learn about them let alone a government body.

So, if you play online, stop complaining or criticizing companies when there is a rumor about them being in partnership with the government. It’s just annoying, who cares, kind of news that is probably untrue but really, a moot point anyway.

You can’t choose to be selectively private online. You can’t choose who reads your Twitter and your Facebook and things like that.  Yes, you can set some privacy options but come on, if people want to read your stuff and learn about you, they will.

There has never been a conversation that I’ve had where I would be like, “Oh noes! Don’t let the government see this!”  I mean, seriously.  Do I really care if the government sees me saying, “Oh, thank you!” and “Wanna do lunch next week?”  No.  I don’t and you shouldn’t either.  This is the kind of resistance news that turns us into being all mad at a company when our attention should be poured into our own companies. Do better, move forward, don’t get hung up and you’ll do just fine.

Next please.