Saw this post about Facebook on Robin Hamman's blog earlier today and it made me think a little. I mean, is there really something that sinister about all of these links? I'm partial to the odd conspiracy theory from time to time. Most of them are moderately entertaining. Some are funny. And some are in the tinfoil hat category. It's possible to add two and two and come up with almost any number if you are so inclined, and that seems to be the case with every thing from Nazi Moon Bases to chemtrails.

So is there anything really sinister about the backers of Facebook in that video? Well, not really. I mean, it's the worst kept secret in the world that pretty much every site is harvesting information about their users. Look at what happens with Gmail - it scans your mails and puts up ads relevant to the content of the email. Now, when I got first signed up for Gmail, I was slightly concerned, but realistically, I, as a 28 year old punter from Dublin, am unlikely to have anything so sensitive and dangerous in my mail as to raise a red flag with anyone.

Likewise on my Facebook page, it's unlikely that anyone is going to come across some earth-shattering piece of information that is going to result in me being rendered to a kindly third world client state to undergo various types of torture in order to extract information about my social life and political leanings. The worst thing someone will find out from my myspace page is that I smoke cigarettes and drink.

With that said, having moved into the world of being an employer rather than an employee, I can see certain risks associated with what you put up on your social networking profiles. I'm a big fan of all of these sites, but there is an inherent danger in being too honest. I can't tell you the number of sites I have seen at random in which people talk about everything from their sexual predilections to the amount of coke-fuelled nights they enjoy in a random four week period.

None of that matters to me, but in a world where several people can be sacked from Merrill Lynch for receiving unsolicited emails which had pornographic pictures attached, I can see how major companies and employers might go through someones Myspace/Bebo/Facebook page before that individual reaches the interview stage. And given the corporate guidelines that some of these people have, I can see how a certain level of pure honesty might cause problems.

Back to the issue at hand though. Despite the fact that there are Government agencies in many countries worldwide who are tasked with gathering vast amounts of info on their (and other country's) citizens, surely they are not interested in who pokes who or what individual has a particular widget on their Facebook page? I'm open to being corrected on this front, but I would suspect that if this video is something that might make you think of closing your Facebook account, you should probably invest in a roll of tinfoil for forthcoming millinery uses. Or reprogram your calculator so that 2+2=5.