PeekYou Education Series: Educating Users & Empowering Consumers

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Over the next few months, PeekYou will be rolling out a series of blog posts known as the “PeekYou Education Series.” Our goal with these posts is to give our users the ability to understand how search engines like PeekYou find public information online and to raise the general level of awareness that users should have when it comes to the information that we share and consume everyday. We feel that many times our users and other individuals across the web do not necessarily understand how keeping their privacy settings open, or sending out a tweet to the public web, can be picked up by various sources across the web. All of us here at PeekYou feel its important that users get as much education and information as possible about how all of these various components of the web work, allowing them to make a better, more educated decision when it comes to sharing information online and posting information to the public web.

This series was sparked by the comments and feedback from users that we receive everyday, mostly from users who are upset or shocked to find so much information about themselves in one location. While we think it is not a bad thing at all to be public and to share your information with others freely, we want to ensure (through these posts) that consumers and users have the tools and knowledge to navigate the online world. After all, knowledge is power, and we want to empower our users with information.

Further to this point, we also see a big shift happening online, whereby people are starting to recognize “Identity” as being separate by connected to “Privacy”: You can have a robust online identity and yet still remain private in many ways. This shift happening across the web is one of the reasons our CEO Michael Hussey and our GM of Product Josh Mackey recently attended the PII 2011 Conference (privacy identity innovation) in San Francisco, CA last week.

Stay tuned for more posts in the PeekYou Education Series that will be going on throughout the summer. Feel free to engage with us through Twitter and our Facebook page, as well as our blog.