We live in interesting times. More specifically, we live in the Information Age! With a new age comes new values and cultural shifts, and I claim one of the central changes is this: information is the new currency.

True, you can’t go to the store and buy milk with information. So in the literal sense the dollar, if you’re American, still reigns as king. Of course, it’s all funny money, but that’s a whole other thing.

So what do I actually mean? Well, information has actual value in a way that it didn’t before. The quantitative value, if there is such a thing, differs depending on who you ask. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that information, especially information about you, has become more valuable.

How so, you ask? Well, let’s put it in real terms. Companies like Facebook and Google gather information on your habits, your likes and dislikes, and any other stuff they can get on you. They then use this data to guess what kinds of products and services you might be interested in, and then serve up advertisements tailored to you. Thus, to some extent, we can quantify the monetary value of information about you, or at least Facebook and Google can. Sure, marketing departments were doing this sort of thing before, but it wasn’t till now, the Information Age, that companies could really tap the wellspring of data about everyone on the planet.

To some extent, we willingly give up this information by adding it to our Facebook profiles and letting Google read our email. We’re paying for the services provided by Google and Facebook with our information. The troublesome issue here is that it’s not very explicit as to what information we’re giving away, which leads us to our first activity!

What follows is an overview of what the next three class sessions will look like. I encourage you to read it for context, but feel free to skip ahead to the Process section if you’re chomping at the bit.

We’re going to start with a quick look at what your own information exposure level is, and by proxy, that of your friends and family. The emphasis here is on "quick." There is a wealth of information out there, some public, some private, and it’s beyond the scope of this WebQuest to catalog it all, even just the information about you. That said, we’re going to attempt to answer these questions:

It seems odd to use the word "hopefully" here, but hopefully you’ve heard of the practice of facebook stalking. You’re going to take it one step further by using anything you can find on the Internet to obtain as much personal information as you can about yourself. As you accumulate information, see if you can figure out where it came from. For example, do you think it came from your Facebook profile? Your Twitter feed?

Once you have an idea of what’s out there as well as a guess as to where it might have come from, you can begin to develop a qualitative feel for how much control you have over your information. How exposed are you?

Once you’ve evaluated how much information about you is publicly available and how much control you can exert over this information, it’s time to ask the question: "What’s the risk?" In other words, does it matter if that information is out there? Do people really care that you live in a particular city or like a certain type of movie?

You might not care too much, especially if social networking sites like Facebook were available during your high school years. If you’re used to sharing, having all that information out there might not seem so risky.

Activity II is all about trying to define a level of risk associated with your information exposure. I’m going to ask you to take a good, hard look at the types of information you found during Activity I as well as any other types of information you can think of and think of a negative, detrimental, or malicious use for them. There’s valuable information out there about you! How can it hurt you? You wouldn’t want to have your real money exposed to the public, would you? Is information any different?

For example, in your search you may have found some information that a potential employer may decide renders you unattractive for hiring. Or, say someone were to find your home address and have malicious intent. They might rob your home, or worse! Of course, companies like Google and Facebook probably have much more data about you than you found in Activity I. Furthermore, they have the technical expertise to combine all of the data they have about you to look at trends in your life and maybe even predict what you might do next.

There are myriad potential risks, but your job is not to enumerate all of them. Rather, I am asking you to evaluate your level of risk. Are you someone who posts detailed information about your life to the 'net? Are you making it too easy for people to find potentially harmful information about you? Is there a clear delineation of what represents harmful information and what is benign? How much risk are you willing to accept? Did your level of risk change now that you’ve evaluated our information exposure?

At this point you might be a little concerned. You might be asking questions about how you might reduce your information exposure or risk. Maybe the question you’re really asking is: "How do I keep my information private?" If information is so valuable, don’t you want to hoard it and protect it? After all, you put all your money in a bank!

"Wait!" you say. "I don’t want all of my information to be private! I still want to be able to share things with my friends and family." It’s true, humans are by nature social animals, and we have a need to be part of a community. You just want to be able to share parts of your lives with a select group of people and not with the general public.

In Activity III we’re going to try to come up with solutions to this problem and rigorously evaluate them by picking apart each other’s ideas. Don’t worry, we’re not trying to re-invent some security protocol or cryptographic algorithm. Really what we’re doing is trying to get a feel for how effective these algorithms and protocols are and what weaknesses they might have.

After we spend some time brainstorming and discussing ideas, we’ll take a brief look at how things are actually done on the Internet. Your assignment will then be to form a coherent narrative about your own personal plan of action regarding your behavior on the Internet. This story will tie together all of the things you’ve learned about the value of information, information exposure, risk, and protecting information.