Using Google to mine MySpace for Philadelphia drug users

I hope to write a piece about online privacy and how we are willingly giving it away, but for now, just ponder this search on Google.

Consider it in the hands of someone like me, who can use Perl or Python, to automate a crawl that starts from there, and then discovers friends and associates of those with a high instance of certain keywords.

Then consider that law enforcement can subpoena for anyone's identity on MySpace. So don't think that pseudonyms are protection. In this day and age sometimes agencies bypass the judicial system and go straight to the service for such information.

Think about it and know that whatever you post on the web, can and will be used against you someday.