Serious Privacy Issues
Privacy is rocketing up the list of things that are important to me. In fact the number one thing on my mind right now is the safety of my friends.
I live a wide-open life. I would like to think of myself as pioneering a new form of communication of one's self wherein a vast amount of "me" is available online via pictures, video, this blog, and various social networking profiles.
You can more or less trace nearly everything I have done or been involved in since 2003.
This accomplishes many things. First, it develops a track record of me for me, I can punch in a date and find out where I was, what I was thinking, and what I looked like thanks to various services. Second, it creates an open and audit-able "paper trail" for anyone that any question about who I really am and what I'm about. It sends many job offers my way. It allows those that I don't see often to keep up with me. It keeps me honest. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents me from having to tell many stories twice.
I would like to think my online track record makes me more employable and trust-worthy compared to my peers who do not have as extensive of an online footprint. The absolutely insane number of job offers I get via phone calls from my blog I think confirms this hypothesis.
There are some major drawbacks though. I have been a victim of stalkers since I was a senior in high school in late 2004. People call me, insult me, and invite me to weird events on a nearly daily basis. In fact, it has reached a level that when I was a victim of attempted robbery at gun point a couple months ago (my friends didn't get away so luckily) it felt just another day that strangers had invaded my life.
Another such drawback of living such a wide-open digital life is that it gives people a great sense that they know me when they haven't actually met me before. I honestly can no longer count the number of times I have been approached on the street or at a school where people have just started talking to me about something in my life like they're one of my best friends. I really appreciate people caring that much about my life, but you don't know what it is like to sit there when someone tells you about your personal views on life and you're trying to figure out who they are (or asking yourself "why did I blog that?").
You haven't lived until you've been approached by someone you don't know at an out-of-state gas station that says they recognize you from the internet. Thank you Illinois and displaced Bucks fans.
That hasn't been a true problem until recently though, when it turned from my views on Google and the Republican Party to my friends and how people want to hang out with them. There is a line in the sand and it has been crossed.
My friends are my friends, not those of random strangers. I had already been taking steps to protect the privacy of certain female friends of mine. This includes not revealing their full names, not geo-tagging photos in Flickr (like the one used for this post), and hiding completely innocent photos and stories from my readers about them for fear of them being harassed.
It's a shame, but I now will have to go to greater lengths.
I marked my first photos as private on Flickr today, meaning that all of my friends will now need accounts to get access to photos of themselves. This isn't a huge deal, but creates a problem when they want to share the photos with their friends. I'm not going to mark every photo as private, but if you think you're going to see photos of my friends hanging out with me going forward, guess again.
I'm going to start throwing dummy data on Flickr. Some of my more harassed friends will begin to have new names in an attempt to end random people from approaching me on the street and acting like we're old friends.
I will also not be geo-tagging any photos that weren't taken in public spaces (I was already to a great extent doing this).
This is my life, you're welcome to take a look at it and follow along. You're not welcome to harass me, my friends and family.
I live a wide-open life. I would like to think of myself as pioneering a new form of communication of one's self wherein a vast amount of "me" is available online via pictures, video, this blog, and various social networking profiles.
You can more or less trace nearly everything I have done or been involved in since 2003.
This accomplishes many things. First, it develops a track record of me for me, I can punch in a date and find out where I was, what I was thinking, and what I looked like thanks to various services. Second, it creates an open and audit-able "paper trail" for anyone that any question about who I really am and what I'm about. It sends many job offers my way. It allows those that I don't see often to keep up with me. It keeps me honest. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents me from having to tell many stories twice.
I would like to think my online track record makes me more employable and trust-worthy compared to my peers who do not have as extensive of an online footprint. The absolutely insane number of job offers I get via phone calls from my blog I think confirms this hypothesis.
There are some major drawbacks though. I have been a victim of stalkers since I was a senior in high school in late 2004. People call me, insult me, and invite me to weird events on a nearly daily basis. In fact, it has reached a level that when I was a victim of attempted robbery at gun point a couple months ago (my friends didn't get away so luckily) it felt just another day that strangers had invaded my life.
Another such drawback of living such a wide-open digital life is that it gives people a great sense that they know me when they haven't actually met me before. I honestly can no longer count the number of times I have been approached on the street or at a school where people have just started talking to me about something in my life like they're one of my best friends. I really appreciate people caring that much about my life, but you don't know what it is like to sit there when someone tells you about your personal views on life and you're trying to figure out who they are (or asking yourself "why did I blog that?").
You haven't lived until you've been approached by someone you don't know at an out-of-state gas station that says they recognize you from the internet. Thank you Illinois and displaced Bucks fans.
That hasn't been a true problem until recently though, when it turned from my views on Google and the Republican Party to my friends and how people want to hang out with them. There is a line in the sand and it has been crossed.
My friends are my friends, not those of random strangers. I had already been taking steps to protect the privacy of certain female friends of mine. This includes not revealing their full names, not geo-tagging photos in Flickr (like the one used for this post), and hiding completely innocent photos and stories from my readers about them for fear of them being harassed.
It's a shame, but I now will have to go to greater lengths.
I marked my first photos as private on Flickr today, meaning that all of my friends will now need accounts to get access to photos of themselves. This isn't a huge deal, but creates a problem when they want to share the photos with their friends. I'm not going to mark every photo as private, but if you think you're going to see photos of my friends hanging out with me going forward, guess again.
I'm going to start throwing dummy data on Flickr. Some of my more harassed friends will begin to have new names in an attempt to end random people from approaching me on the street and acting like we're old friends.
I will also not be geo-tagging any photos that weren't taken in public spaces (I was already to a great extent doing this).
This is my life, you're welcome to take a look at it and follow along. You're not welcome to harass me, my friends and family.
posted by Jeramey @ 8/08/2007 03:01:00 AM
2 Comments:
At August 13, 2007 7:07 AM ,
freckle face boutique said...
This post has been removed by the author.
At August 13, 2007 7:09 AM ,
raster said...
Jeramey, I don't think I've been as open as you have, but I'm pretty close. This is an interesting topic, and might be something you want to have a discussion about at BarCampMilwaukee2.
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