With my blog and Twitter, I’ve opened up my private business more so than most. It’s certainly benefitted me in many ways, but one detriment is a loss of privacy. It’s not that big of a deal, but I probably share more than I would normally share with people I don’t know and have never met.

I’ve said it a couple times, but I like to keep my Facebook page private, and I generally only connect with personal friends and business contacts I know pretty well. I receive quite a few Facebook friend requests, but I prefer to only accept requests from people I really know. There’s often a grey area because some people are more casual acquaintances and I know some people better than others.

That said, you should really be cautious when accepting friend requests. People may judge you by people with whom you are friends, and if they are acquainted primarily via Facebook, you may not actually know them well. In a small industry like this one, it’s quite possible to be Facebook friends with people you may have only heard about but don’t actually know.

I’ve seen instances when this is an issue. I know a couple people who befriended industry colleagues on Facebook and later found out they weren’t exactly on the up and up. In a business where reputation is everything, you should be cautious about “friending” people you don’t know all that well.

One thing that bothers me quite a bit and I’ve heard others complain about it, too, is the amount of automated spam emails that are sent to domain owners to try and sell domain names. These emails are pitching domain names that are similar to names already owned by the recipient, so if a person owns thousands of emails, they probably receive a whole lot of spam.

The most recent example of one I received was an email trying to sell me Top-Notch-Domains.com, since I own the non-hyphenated version. I received several emails (all appropriately caught by my spam filter), but it was annoying to continue to see multiple emails about the same domain name.

The email contained an opt out link, but you may want to think twice about opting out this way. When you opt out, it lets the sender know there’s someone on the receiving end of the email, and that may make them send even more emails about other domain names, possibly from other email accounts.

When I get these emails, I generally prefer to copy some of the language that is the same in all emails and add a filter to automatically delete these emails upon receipt. If you want to be even more aggressive, you can report these emails by forwarding them (headers included) to spam@uce.gov, which was set up by the Federal Trade Commission. If you are technically inclined, you may also want to trace the headers and report the spam to the sender’s hosting company.