According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy. Yet a recent survey by 123people in the Netherlands (Article in Dutch) shows that almost 90 percent people online ‘worry’ about their privacy. This majority said ‘yes’ to the question whether they think it is highly probable that their personal information, reputation or privacy is in danger on the internet. According to them, One out of ten people has lost their job or was rejected for a job on the basis of information found on their profiles. In Spain this  number would even be 1 in 5.

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This -apparently not entirely fictitious- fear  does not translate into much action. Maybe the advantages outweigh the perceived dangers. While two thirds of the respondents chooses to mark their profile as private on social networks and tools like Facebook and Twitter when given, almost 30% of these same respondents does not want to lock these profiles off from the outside world or search engines. It’s a classic: We want to be free, but we don’t want to run the risks that inherently come with that freedom.