Guilty of oversharing? It could be time to call on an old friend

The more deeply we foray into the online world, the more our actions are likely to come back to burst them wide open again at some point down the line.

I only have to open my TimeHop – an app designed to dredge up your social media updates from years past – to cringe at my own still fairly recent stupidity. I haven't found anything controversial (yet), but I do question what 20-year-old Kirsty was thinking when she was quoting mysterious song lyrics and typing smiley faces with noses :o)

Most of the time it's harmless, but this week, while busybodying on the web, I was hit with a stark example of oversharing online.

I'd read a story about a man who had found himself in the news after having a public row with someone famous online. Keen to find out what was said (this is the Jeremy Kyle nation, after all), I popped over to his Twitter page to see what had been going on and get a better understanding of the situation.

I want to go on record at this point as being unapologetic about my nosiness; I'm a journalist after all.

This man's Twitter feed was packed with all sorts of information. I scrolled down and discovered some examples of the great work he'd been doing in his job and scrolled further to read about his opinions on various industry issues. I was interested, so I scrolled again and discovered it had recently been his child's birthday, as shown by photos. Further mooching told me what his dog was called, what it looked like. And perhaps most terrifyingly, he shared on this public platform of strangers, which school his child went to. He's exposed his child's identity to the world – age, birth date, pet, school – in just a week or so's worth of tweets. I knew his name, his wife's name and where they both worked.

In a couple of minutes, I'd easily gathered enough information to successfully unnerve myself.

Now, I'm not a parent, and no one's ultimate safety is reliant upon my ability to successfully protect them from the creeps of the world. But even I can see that there's something terribly worrying about having access to that much information. It's like an episode of some dark ITV drama, isn't it?

You only have to go as far as your own social media feeds to find crucial information.

This weekend I know of at least three acquaintances that are away at Glastonbury. I know where they live, what cool things they've bought for themselves over the last few months and the names of their pets. I'd only have to let that information slip to the wrong person in the pub, or find myself feeling particularly criminal, and I could ruin their life. How scary is that? We're not even particularly close friends. It's a good job I like them really. And that I'm law-abiding, of course.

It's not the first time I've found myself freaked out by the all-knowing power of the web though. I bought a lipstick a few months ago from a company who shortly afterwards found themselves knee-deep in scandal.

It was a Sunday morning that I got the call. I was doing what I always do at 10am on a Sunday – absolutely nothing. The ringing woke me up and the banking advisor on the other end of the line scared me into life.

My bank account had been compromised, and my money stolen. I'd stupidly paid for my lipstick with my debit card, and the shoddy independent cosmetics company hadn't protected it's customers' details.

A look at my statement showed hundreds of pounds had been spent on a variety of rubbish, and though the bank were quick to act and return the money, I was upset.

Frightened

I called one of the companies that had taken the sale from the fraudsters and asked what was happening. They confirmed that someone had ordered a batch of shirts to be delivered to a Manchester address. They'd given their name and passed on my home address as the billing address. They had my number and my email address too. I was frightened out of my wits. These fraudsters knew where I lived! What if they came to break into my house? It wouldn't be hard for them to trace my social media pages down with my email address. What had I put on Facebook? Had I told people my working hours? What had I done?

Oversharing on social media might seem harmless, and to some extent unavoidable in this digital age. But with everything you put out in the public domain, there's a potential consequence. Even writing this now has me paranoid for the backlash.

Aside from chucking our mobile phones and wireless routers out of the window, how do we protect ourselves, and more importantly, our kids?

I feel this is a job for our old, often forgotten friend Common Sense.