The author claims that the Internet used to allow individuals to create a different persona online than they had in real life. Social networking websites like Myspace and Facebook have, the author suggests, transformed that feature into something increasingly difficult to maintain:
But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable.
In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.
I think the author is perhaps overstating things a bit. While many choose to tie all of their online personalities together in a single persona, there are still many ways to keep separate identities online. Your online chess club doesn’t have to know anything about your real life (and vice-a-versa). Your sexual interests can remain as private as you’d like to keep them. Who you’re dating is of nobody’s concern but your own. I know people who have maintained multiple, distinct online personas for over a decade, despite being on Facebook and having otherwise public profiles.
But what it all comes down to is your conscious choice. You have to think about these things before you take action (not the other way around). You have to consider all of the possible ramifications and consequences of sharing a piece of you with the Internet — not just now, but in the forever future. Because the Internet is forever, and everything you share with it by association also becomes forever shared. (Even deleting your profile from a social networking site doesn’t guarantee it’s not going to show up or be maintained in some third-party search engine cache, or as a copy of information being made by someone not associated with the social networking site.)
So the question then becomes, “How can we make informed decisions about how and when to share when we don’t know where or how the information may be cached, or the site’s privacy policy suddenly changed to make all of my previously private information public?”
The answer is you can’t. At least not today. Facebook can change their policy tomorrow and make every piece of “private” information you’ve shared with them public, with the flip of a switch. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing this if it were in their best business interests to do so. The same is true with any other social networking sites. You can delete all of your tweets from twitter, but do you know how many companies are making copies of every tweet sent out and keeping a copy of them in their own databases? The number would astound you. In other words, even when you delete something, it’s not really “gone.”
So does this mean we really can’t “forget” any more? That there is no privacy and we should just stop trying?
I don’t think so. I think the answer is to simply be more careful and selective in what you share and with whom. Choose specific services that don’t congregate your entire life into a single site (like some of the social networking sites try and do), that way even if one site does make a privacy mistake, your entire life isn’t on the line.
I don’t see this as the end of forgetting, I see this as the end of naive sharing any and all information about one’s life with little filtering going on. I see it as people becoming more nuanced about the way their interact with sites like Facebook and Twitter, and understand that what they say and share may have longer legs than they had intended.
7 comments
Three things:
1.) Usenet posts should expire and be deleted given every several to ten years. Accumulated information on Usenet from 20 years ago, is a waste of data storage and irrelevant to today. For example, who really needs to find information on an obsolete garage motor or meaningless chatter among Usenet communities?
2.) Also, during that time, law enforcement should monitor Usenet/Google Groups posts (since it is public, after all) for any red flags, such as hate speech, etc. etc., so that potential evidence could be gathered (within the active period for Usenet posts), *should* a crime be committed in the near future.
3.) Especially for early Usenet users from 80s-90s, who were naive and/or much more deceived now (given what they were told before)… information divulged before the year 2000, is open to abuse and mismanagement by archive proprietors, as well as online stalking by other Internet users.
What a wonderful point. I had not looked at it this way.
Yes, clearly the issue with privacy is about discretion and memory. When you communicate something to someone, you trust that person’s discretion not to talk about it to others. You also expect that, with time, memories will fade and you won’t need to worry about what you say today, 10 years from now. Clearly with the permanence of the Net, these assumptions are no longer valid.
Excellent point.
I think people often make the mistake of assuming that if some site says their information is private, that it will stay private forever. This just isn’t the case. While it’s encouraging to see that more younger people (people my own age) are concerned with their privacy on the internet, I wonder what the kids UNDER 18 are thinking and how they feel on the subject. At that age, you aren’t really thinking about how what you post on MySpace can come back to haunt you in a job interview at age 25, but the reality is that it could happen.
Personally, I assume that nothing I put out on the internet is private, that everyone, including my mother and any future employers will read it, and act accordingly. At the same time, I know it wasn’t always this way for me. It’s like that close friend you tell things to who just can’t keep a secret to save their life; everything gets out eventually unless you keep it to yourself.
To an extent, I think privacy is a bit of a myth, but no more so now than it ever was. The only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead.
And just to drive my point home, today it was revealed that a single file that contains 100 million Facebook links to profiles and people’s names is now available on the Internet as a torrent file. That file will be around forever.
Stuff like this goes on everyday online, it’s just that most of it isn’t publicized, because it’s used for less than legal purposes.
“The only man that can keep a secret is a dead man” I forget who said that but it is true. I agree the amount of privacy you have is up to you. I admit I am a facebook junkie, however, I don’t put serious personal information in my status. I use facebook as means to keep in touch with people that I wouldn’t otherwise be in contact with. My advice to all is just don’t place your personal life on the internet and you will maintain your privacy. The internet doesn’t forget and neither does your computer. If you have something to hide don’t use the computer to hide it… Bad idea!
Last quick note: Messing with personal privacy is like opening a can of worms to the power of number of Internet eye-priers. There are millions/billions of people on the Internet for people to voyeur; but there’s always an unassuming/unknowing few individuals (maybe unaware for a long time, if they’re naive and not paranoid) that a majority is drawn to watching them. It happens.
I think there’s a basic flaw in this article in that it is based on the idea that you choose what is posted about you on the internet. That’s increasingly untrue.
One example is the way Google’s Picassa will search your online pictures so you can tag people. There are also visual search engines such as Tineye that will find similar images. The technology is still being refined but it’s not going to be long before you’ll be able to find all the images of an individual displayed anywhere on the internet. That includes the snap taken by a friend of a friend of a friend when you were part of a group of people who’d had one too many.
As for giving data a fixed shelf life, I think that’s extremely dangerous. How do we decide what’s “useless chatter” as J says of old Usenet postings? On that basis why do we keep copies of old newspapers for reference? Perhaps we should get rid of old census data because all the people are dead.
Our history is now digital. Getting rid of it would be incredibly short-sighted.
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