Privacy and The Message Board

Last week there was a post about privacy and our message board I received this explanation from Mel,one of our HER2 Ambassadors:

Personal Security in a ôSpideredö World
Anytime a person uses an open chat room, posts on an open message board, or even completes a web based form, the information contained on the web site is available to be searched. This is the process by which we can actually find results to the searches we make.
Closed rooms and boards are a totally different issue. Private companies and large corporations use firewall protected network segments to keep private data private, but they have totalitarian control over who access their intranet sites through Network Operating Systems, User Accounts, and policies. By being closed, these systems are secure, but the uninvited are left out!
The best rule of thumb is to think of internet and privacy as oil and water, they donÃâ€*t mix. For a site to be open to the public means it can and will be crawled, and any data contained on that site can and will be publicly disseminated. Trust me, e-mail is the same way. Just remember, donÃâ€*t chat, post, or e-mail any information your not comfortable with having viewed by someone you do not know. That whole ôopenö philosophy is the foundation of, and maybe the biggest problem, with the world wide web!