From CNN
Online photos: Are they new digital fingerprint?
By Mark Milian
(CNN) -- For Mike Smith, Facebook is a fort for communicating freely with friends online.
Within the confines of that giant yet access-restricted network, the music-software engineer from San Francisco believes he can control what's posted about him through the simple courtesy of asking friends to remove unflattering photos.
But on the wide-open Web exists a harsher environment.
Images that make their way outside the walls of Facebook or similarly closed networks can get indexed by search engines and become almost impossible to scrub....
Pew is also considering the privacy implications. "As location awareness now comes in your pocket with that smartphone, it's very likely that there's more of that (GPS data) inadvertently passed along," Rainie said.
Coye Cheshire, a University of California, Berkeley [School of Information] professor who studies social interaction online, is also planning to research this subject more deeply. He's working on a study about people's perceptions of the pictures they post to Facebook and Twitter.
So far in his research, Cheshire has observed that people tend to perceive a loss in their ability to control and contain info about themselves after something bad happens with it.
"What we don't see, however, is any increase in their online discretionary behaviors," he said.
Several factors could account for this phenomenon, which seems to run counter to the experiments where an animal learns to avoid electrodes after getting zapped a few times. "Thankfully, we don't have any data showing people aren't able to learn," Cheshire said with a chuckle.
But perhaps new technologies, with their increasingly slick and simplified interfaces, are outpacing humans' ability to adjust.
How long did it take us to determine the manners and appropriate response times associated with e-mail and text messages? Have we even figured them out yet?
"People are kind of slow, actually, to evolve to large-scale normative shifts," Cheshire said. "It takes a very long time for that to happen."...