How do you feel about privacy?
For one, do you take measures to protect it?
Some people I know ask people not to use their last name online. Other people guard their web servers from being trolled or scanned. Some people use different names at all of their social media sites.
Personally, I turned off search engine access to my LJ and I don’t usually post my full name and my most common user ID together. Otherwise, I do nothing.
Second, how effective do you think you are at maintaining the privacy online that you are comfortable with?
As a favor to my more private friends, even though my picasa gallery conveniently recognizes the faces of the hundreds of people in my gallery, I do not allow it to make that public. I do not expect other people to do the same for me.
Partly, I am protected by my rather common name. When you go to IMDB, you have to hit the sixth or seventh iteration before you find me, and that’s just my field. Now that the Ved Bok film company site doesn’t exist online (which I worked so hard to make popular on google), you can’t find me in google, under my name, for multiple pages, which I think is sufficient. Frankly, I think what privacy I have is solely related to my irrelevancy for most people.
I’m not particularly worried about it. I treasure the ability (such as we have) to make some things private if I want, but I also enjoy not needing it.
I am resting on the comfort of who I am. As a reasonably liberal-minded person in a creative industry, I have some flexibility. I don’t make public incriminating photos (except in the embarrassingly geeky way), and my online persona, in my belief, is identical to who I am in real life. Perhaps slightly more pedantic. I’m a white male nigh-married professional with no major disabilities, unsurprising hobbies and political beliefs for my career – I have the luxury of being myself and not worrying too much about what a future employer might find.
Of course I’m also idealistic enough to believe that ANY job in which I have to completely bury who I am in an utter falseness will A) totally suck, and B) never work out. I don’t need to chat about who I am to the people I work for, but I don’t hide it, either, and I’m not very good at lying anymore.
Ultimately, I think that everything is available to anyone willing to search long enough or pay enough for it. I think any actual privacy we have is the illusion afforded to us by our irrelevancy to the vast majority of the population, which is why we know every tiny little detail about famous people. They’ve lost the only real protection we have.
How is it with you?
Some people I’ve known have been incredibly, incredibly private. As in, burn all copies, shred all documents, emergency switch on the PC kind of private.
While I would love to think that is not an indication of trouble, merely someone who treasures keeping who they are to themselves, so far each of them has turned out to have something pretty serious to hide. Including the SysOp of a bulletin board who went to jail for molesting a boy. So, there’s that, and I think about stuff like that when I consider how comfortable I am with being “public” – like I am not doing my part to stand up and say “I am doing nothing wrong, but I still don’t want my information used against me.”
Considering what my legal name is, when googled I’m the first link as long as you include some variation of my first name. If you don’t you get a cheesey video trailer to a book…… Like you, if I use just my birth name or my husband’s last name (like I do in facebook) there are MILLIONS of me.
I try to keep things locked down a bit just because then I don’t have to worry about other peoples reactions to something that might leak out by accident.
Of course, I tend to think that if someone is truly interested in tracking me down or stealing my ID, they are either very sneaky, or it is just a random act of fate.
I don’t have any secrets, but there are a few individual people i don’t like to give the satisfaction of being able to watch me through the internet too closely. I really don’t mind strangers watching, just not these few obnoxious people who have made themselves known to me and are an irritating force. I do post pics of my kids and their first names, which i probably shouldn’t do, but i figure anyone walking by in wal-mart could gather the same information by following us for 3 minutes, so what’s the big deal?