UT (and Google...) restrict MY info

After reading this week's text on, well.... basically the end of privacy due to Google, it reminded me of UT's campaign to get students to restrict their information.

On the UT Web site, it reads:

"The university keeps data about you that can be shown to the public, by federal law, without your permission. We call this 'directory information'. (The public includes your parents, friends, employers, insurers, and people checking on your degrees.)"

Personal phone numbers and home addresses submitted to UT upon acceptance are available automatically online. The proactive and pro-privacy Longhorn must actively go online to change their information to private.

The article states that "Google has quietly but unmistakably changed our expectations about what we can know about one another" and I agree. I don't remember when it started happening, but suddenly everyone is googling each other (and not eye googling...), potential employers are Facebook-ing applicants and privacy seems almost forgotten and even parents are seeing pictures through Facebook, myspace and Flikr.... that maybe they wouldn't have been shown otherwise.