molly.com
Sunday 13 May 2007
How Private Are You?
We are entering an age where anyone with an ounce of savvy can figure out who we are, what we do, where we live, who our family members are and so on. Me, I gave up a while back and have left myself to fate.
Most people can’t afford that. With family and children and loved ones, privacy can be very important.
But for me, truly? I believe privacy is dead. It means being braver, but maybe I have that luxury because I’m not a spouse or a parent.
What about you? Is privacy dead for you?
Filed under: molly asks you, policies, professional, society
Posted by: Molly | 22:49 | Comments (55)
I think the best we can do is to be the author of our own public image. Other than that, one could try running in circles online that wouldn’t like to reveal themselves, either. That way nobody’ll incriminate you because it’ll incriminate them too! :3
Bachelor(ette)hood has it’s perks, verily.
I don’t think so, its all up to the degree of privacy you want to maintain.
It’s not hard to be web blind. That is not mentioned on the internet at all. In fact the web promotes this t a degree.
If you where careful and worked at profile building online, it is possible to create and maintain a totally separate web identity that is distinct and separate from real life. It just takes time and good deal of recordkeeping of where and what you have said and done.
This does mean that you would have to avoid social gatherings etc as well.
Privacy is pretty much dead for me, but that’s entirely by choice. I don’t really hide much — I post all my photos online, I geocode them, etc, etc. So I don’t think privacy is dead, really — but I’ve made it so, for me.
It took me a while to get comfortable with it, though. I do have a 12-year old daughter and I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t post some of the things I do, knowing that she’ll see them (eventually, if not right away). And, like everyone, I’ve worried about how it might affect my chances at getting a job somewhere in the future. But, I eventually came to feel like it was liberating to not hide. If my daughter knows from my pictures that I go out and drink and have a good time, fine — I’d rather be honest with her. If she knows I cuss sometiems from their captions, fine. And frankly — if someone doesn’t want to hire me because of my photos or what I say on my blog, then I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to work for that person, anyway.
That having been said — being as “out there” as I am is defintiely not for everyone, and I always warn people to think twice before they post anything online. Stuff just can’t be taken back — once it’s out there, it’s out there. So, by all means, be careful.
For me there is a big difference between the information I choose to give out and the information I don’t.
There is a lot of information about me on the web but the vast majority isn’t personal.
What I object to more is companies or governments asking for information that isn’t necessary. In fact the laws in the UK, when people choose to follow them, prevent people holding unnecessary data, or any data longer than they need it for.
It never used to bother me … until I started getting grief, and losing friends, over things I’ve said and done online.
So now, I just don’t know. I’m having as little to do with t’internet as possible while I work it out.
Good question, I’d say that to a point it’s a choice, you choose to put pictures and to blog online, you choose what you write about yourself. The frontier is however rather fuzzy, as other people can also talk about you, you can appear on their photos, group photos, event reports and photos, you are never quite alone and master of your own image, be it online or off… The web is a tricky mistress, the more you play with her, the riskier it gets…
I’m less obsessively private than I used to be. Flickr had a bit to do with that – I realised that I was happy for other people to post photos of me, so it was a bit silly not to do that myself
Plus there’s a point where visibility precludes the level of anonymity I once aimed for. I don’t use a pseudonym in my professional life and let’s face it, you can’t hide in corners after standing on stage
I still keep some limits though. I’d keep more if it was practical, but it’s not. If I was truly bothered I’d have to opt out of an awful lot of online interaction… which I don’t really want to do.
“happy for other people to post photos of me” …on second thoughts, that should have been “resigned to the fact that other people will post photos of me…”
Well, I’m definitely reasonably free with information. I am a family man, and I have web pages for my kids, my family, etc. We have a relatively uncommon last name, so tracking us down isn’t a problem.
The way I look at it, the only real defense is awareness. I am AWARE of what information is out there. I do simple things like monitor my kids computer use (my kids will never have a computer in their room until they move out). I will also review logs on their computers the same way a corporation does. The way I see it, it’s training them to use the internet responsibly, and they can expect the same treatment in the corporate world.
But I digress. I recently (tonight) posted a thread at Sitepoint about Web Security through POCS. POCS is Plain Old Common Sense. I figured if POSH could bring to light what we already know (about semantic HTML), then maybe POCS could do the same with common sense.
Privacy is pretty much dead. Your own use of POCS will determine if the information out there will sink you.
Molly
There is a whole pile of stuff anybody can find out about me by simply googling my name. However I defy most people to find out anything about my wife and four children; and that is the way things have been planned. They have no desire to be traced on-line and that is fine.
Likewise, although fairly sociable and talkative, anybody who *really* knows me well, can testify I can talk a lot without really revealing too much about myself.
It really is under your own control, what you care to reveal, publish or care to have published on your own behalf.
In terms of privacy from peers, it is very much alive. Privacy from Government agencies is altogether another far more serious matter. I live in the UK, the most state monitored country on earth, bar none.
A bit behind the curve here — see David Brin’s essay on The Transparent Society (1998)
http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html
Privacy was an invention of urbanisation; and with the coercive power of the state to intrude (UK CCTV installations passim) we are now in the panopticon again. So why not full disclosure?
I think there is still quite a lot of choice. I have chosen to be selectively open — there are some things that a great many people know about, others not. I blogged under my own name from the very beginning, but a lot of that was wanting to have some influence on my searchability, having moved around so much.
Equally, the arrival of a homophobic troll on my blog at a relatively early stage in the game, who threatened to rape myself and my girlfriend and tried to track us down, etc etc, made clear that some details (address, phone number, NI number) were worth protecting. And that understanding the law around when that was regarded as crossing the line was necessary too.
I regard privacy on the web with exactly the same attitude I have towards tattoos — I accept that what is said is essentially permanent, so you’d better be 100% happy that what you said reflected who you were. And have healthy enough self image to not hate “the old you” every couple of years/months/weeks.
Do I still like every tattoo I have? Maybe not. But they are still representative of who I was when I chose them. And I can still like that person, so no problem.
I’ve given up on privacy a long time ago. If someone wants to find something out about someone, they can. Even if they’ve never posted anything on the internet themselves. Especially if they haven’t taken steps to make sure their information isn’t on the internet.
That being said, I don’t go out of my way to make information public. I’m not going to just hand out certain information to people I don’t know. That’s just being smart, I think.
I have never given up my privacy and don’t intend to. Mostly because I share it with other people and even if I didn’t yet I would think that could happen.
I have a rather extensive online life and a great number of occurences on google, you can find me in discussion lists when I was college, find me on Mac Mini users lists, on web, graphics and software development lists and blogs. I have a blog of my own…
You can see my pictures in flickr and you can find out I have a lot of pets and you can even see a bunch of pictures of my wife.
However, you’ll find close to nothing about my private life. You won’t find out where I live exactly.
I’ve chosen not to expose how my private life goes and not to share close feelings with strangers and I think I pretty much succeded.
Personal info, some… private life info, nope…
Privacy online is still something that’s controllable. I know many people who are completely untracable through google, simply because they never posted anything about themselves online.
I’m for 90% in control of what’s posted online about me, and have been since I started posting stuff online. And the other 10% is easily rectified (though i’ve never needed too).
The keyword is restraint.
I was recently quoted in Nature (no, really) about this very thing. I’ve had death threats, threats of violence, threats of property damage made against me. My seven year old autistic daughter has been the target of abuse from this same group. She’s been compared to a trained monkey and I’ve been told I can expect parcels of bananas for her.
I know of scientists who had threats of violence made against them, utterly untrue slurs made on their character and reputations and who’ve been the recipient of telephone and email harassment campaigns to the point where security services for their university campus has had to be involved for their protection.
The reason? Because we don’t believe vaccines cause autism and we blog (in my case) or do science (in their case) about it. The group doing it? Believe it or not, other parents of autistic kids who believe vaccines do cause autism and are willing to turn to threats as it becomes clearer that there is no science to support their hypothesis.
I have to say that if I knew then what I knew now, I might be a bit more private. These people are seriously kooky. Unfortunately, I started talking about my kids before all this.
The recipe for success is simple. Assume that anyone can know anything about you, and live your life accordingly.
Privacy? At what degree and what level? Much of that is dependent upon level of vulnerability and that is dependent upon a value system — things that any individual, in their assessment, does not wish to place at risk.
Internet communication increases exposure to a much larger audience. Internet communication, for many individuals, carries a low down side of consequence for any behavior. Monkeys will always be monkeys, they crap in their hands and sling it around. That behavior only is present in the confines and environment of other monkeys. Possibly view the Internet, for a few people, as one big monkey cage?
Would someone physically reach out to cause your children or spouse harm because of your Internet presence? Very small probability. That does not mean that anyone should disclose information about any family member.
I am much more concerned about privacy and security issues involving children who are online, or the existence of misguided legislation such as the US Patriot Act, or corporate data mining, the sale of product purchase histories to health and life insurance companies with personally identifying information, the escalation of intrusive and malicious code within Internet communication — the list is endless.
Those are the real threats not the unlikely threat presented by a damn keyboard banging monkey.
I have had some things bite me on the butt in the past, but I don’t think that privacy is completely dead. As others on here, I have made it a choice to be open with the things I say, post, and do (online and offline). It is a level of transparency that is sometimes hard in the digital age, as some people can interpret things differently. It is tough to some degree, due to the miscommunications that can occur – but it all comes down to managing your online persona and how you want to be represented.
Even to this day – there are some things I would like to take back (even if they did drive traffic to my site). With my new re-design, I will actually be pruning some of the things I said previously – with an explanation as to why. I know its already cached into the abyss of the www, but for me personally – I think it is the best option.
None of your damn business!
I think Mr. Buchanan raises an important point, which would help clarify my statement. We are (mostly) all resigned to the fact that people are putting pictures of us (and other information about us) on the internet. That’s why I think it’s important for people to create some authoritative name-and-face information about themselves, in so that they can have some part in what people find out about them on the internet.
For me, it’s a mixed bag. My domain registrations are public, but I use a box, not my street address. I’ve always been somewhat private, so it’s fairly easy to keep what needs to be un-Googleable. As far as I know, they haven’t yet developed an algorithm that can spider my head.
Since I didn’t change my name when I married, and I’ve never posted “the spousal unit”’s name online, I do have distinctive public and private lives.
How long the private remains private is questionable. I’m one who needs wholesale changes in life periodically. I strongly suspect I’ll be flying (rather than digging) my way out of a rut within weeks.
Funny story actually- We had one client of sunder media a few years back who were petrified that her phone number was online. She insisted that we get it off of the internet (assuming we put it there). We tried to explain to her that we did not put her phone number online, we meerly instructed her on how she could find information like that… It was of couse located on the local phone directories website because that contained all of the listings from the phone book!
I don’t try to keep things private, it would be too much work! I do however, occasionally do an ego search… just to make sure I know everything that is out there with my name.
Great question, great comments. When I put my first website on line, it was to share info with family and friends. Since then, I have made acquaintances through various discussion lists, and have invited people to critique my work. Most recently, I have decided to split off my family/friends site off from my web design site, and password protect the former. The main reason for this is that our family is increasingly involved with others, whose privacy I value very much. I have had numerous discussions with my kids the reasons behind this, and why they need to use caution and discretion when publishing info about themselves on MySpace and FaceBook.
Also, I have found information about myself on-line that was inaccurate or used without my permission. I politely but sternly asked that it be removed, with good success.
So, although some family information is in the public domain, I’m rebuilding some walls for them. And, I am making sure that I am authoring my own public presence, not allowing others to do so.
Peter
“Trust, but verify” – Runyon & Reagan
There’s a lot of information about me out there on the Internets. I’ve been on the net for about 20 years now, and who knew that every pearl of wisdom that dribbled from my fingers on Usenet in 1988 would go down on my permanent record? That said, most of what’s out there about me doesn’t bother me. I’m a shortwave listener and a web developer and a photographer and a genealogist; you’ll be buried in information about those four things if you Google me. Other aspects of my life I absolutely don’t mention online. There’s nothing you can find here to associate me with them. Not that I’m ashamed of them, just that they’re nobody’s business. So yes, despite the fact that you can find out a whole lot about me, there’s a whole lot about me that you won’t find online, and I intend to keep it that way.
I totally agree with you that privacy is dead, but lets be honest, who are people wanting to keep things from. If its the various governments of the world, then privacy has been dead for many, many years already. I have no kids, so privacy doesn’t really bother me. I don’t intentionally go out of my way to tell people about myself but also, i’m not really bothered if people find out how old I that I shop in Tesco.
The more active you are on the web – the more information is available for someone to trace you. It’s almost as simple as that. And really, anyone who thinks they can go online and not be traced at all is seriously fooling themselves.
Like you said Molly – with enough savvy – anyone can trace someone else…it’s just not that hard. Should we be worried? Should we be locking ourselves away for fear of someone being able to find us? Well – if someone’s privacy is already ‘that’ important – then I say get off the web altogether…or like the line in that classic move, erm, Terminator 2…’get off the grid’.
But even THAT might not work because you can’t stop what third-parties might write about you (or relating to you)…and that would be purely unintentional.
There are things that I’m quite open about online – certain thoughts, views and such, but there’s also a lot that I’ve kept private too.
Privacy definitely has it’s value – and should be considered carefully, but the increased amounts of personal information now available on the web are making ‘online privacy’ a bit of a nonsense.
Privacy has always seemed to me to be illusory by nature, albeit a wonderful concept that can exist when all concerned respect the illusion, but an illusion nevertheless. If I learned nothing else living and working onboard U.S Navy submarines for four years it was that that illusion was fragile. Like quiet in library it must be of value to all concerned to exist at all.
Privacy is important for safety reasons when one has children/loved ones to protect,etc. but really hampering for creativity. I just use my web “alias” for all my online dealings. I am consistently Corbid Ravenous when online. I even get mail for Corbid Ravenous. Makes it easy to track who’s putting me on mailing lists
having multiplicity of folks with the same name can be devestating. there is a fellow on google search that was charged for animal abuse and cruelty. but then i learned to be quieter now. i am too ill to push the evnelope. being crazy is a hobby , my real job is just surviving.
Great question, and interesting responses. I’ve been thinking about this myself lately, as I play with adding more information about myself (what I’m reading, watching, etc.) to my website. I really enjoy sharing information with others, but it is indeed a fine line between transparency and…something weirder.
Lately, I’ve been going with a rule on more personal information of adding it to my website after the fact. For example, we just got back from vacation in England, and I didn’t really talk about it beforehand; I’m in the process of Flickring up pics, etc. now, and writing up some comments. It works for me, and makes feel feel a little more in control of the info. Of course, it’s a rule of thumb…there are some conferences, etc. that I might go to where I’d want to share earlier.
Yes, privacy is dead for me. I used to use a pseudonym on the internet, but then switched to using my first name or initials and even my full name on occasion.
The internet is becoming more personal and search technology is getting more advanced every day. It takes a lot of work to remain completely anonymous. I don’t have that kind of energy.
I generally assume that everything I write can be found without much effort. There are people who I do not want to share my life with, and I know that they can find me if they look hard enough. It is a risk I am willing to take because I like the social and personal direction that the web is taking. It is a new kind of community that has never existed before and I find it all very exciting.
To me privacy is only an excuse (anymore): nothing more than a reason to hide ignorance and lack of knowledge.
yah privacy is dead for me …
Too much privacy = Extremely lonely
Such a fine site and such an interesting topic. To the point:
Identity is (to my thinking) a design of our will. If we are people of courage, our identities are dynamic, never static. The web is also dynamic (so far) and so it reflects our best and worst traits in dynamic and unpredictable ways. It is the epitome of media – raw, uncontrollable, dangerously dynamic. Savage. Anyone who thinks they can control media: I dare them to have a Wikipedia page about themselves. I may not like what I read about myself on vanity google searches, and I may hate what reviewers say about my music. But it’s like the waves in the ocean. The more you struggle against them, the more likely it is you’ll drown in them. It’s the best teacher I know to impart the virtues of circumspection, restraint, honesty, and humility. Then, after you’ve done your best (been your own heroine in your own movie) you let history and herstory write itself. It sure is incentive to be good, to be fair, and to live well.
Your site and your insights will bring me back for more.
-Jessica
Privacy isn’t dead for me. I know many peoples and I think I am not interesting for them. So I have my own castle at home and my privacy.
If you search on my name, the first result that comes up is a former drug addict with the same name, and the second and third are a B-movie actress. I come up fourth. I really sometimes want to write to whoever is hosting the site with the drug addict’s story on it and ask them to change the name used as I fear someone might think it is me who has this sordid past.
When I think about this issue I find it rather worrying. My weblog gives people access to my private (public) thoughts and my diary and my personal details can easily be looked up on certain national websites but really this part has been my choice.
The area that I find more concerning is that which I don’t have any control:
My privacy is really invaded by the very mechanisms set up to help protect society and help make my life easier, such as the UKs national DNA database, CCTV camaras nearly everywhere I go and creditcard data enables certain people to know what I purchase, where I go on holiday and what I like to do in my spare time.
In regards to the internet; privacy is dying, but freedom to access information has rocketed! The internet gives you access to far more information than you ever believed possible, with privacy perhaps taking a knock as a side effect.
thanks
good article
There´s no privacy.
thanks for good write
thanks
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this subject is very important for us .