Earlier today, I was reading the post by my friend Kerri from Sixuntilme where she refers to how her views on privacy/disclosure have evolved since she became pregnant. It dawned on me that I have also changed how much I value my privacy online, perhaps not since we had our son but more in the past couple of years.
Back in March 2007, we started TuDiabetes, a social network for people touched by diabetes. At the time, I was already fairly comfortable in social media, being a member of more than a dozen networks. This meant, I opened myself up quite a bit… perhaps too much.
Below are some of the things I do when it comes down to my privacy. Why? Because there are enough people out there that don’t have the best intentions in the world. So that doesn’t mean I have shut up and stopped participating in social media altogether (those who know me know that NOT to be the case -if you don’t know me, Google me and you will see what I mean). It just means to be mindful when you share something online, withholding what you don’t feel comfortable sharing with people you don’t know.
- If I am traveling, for vacation or business, I don’t announce it ahead of time. Even more so, most of the time, I don’t write ABOUT it while I am away.
- If I am at a place at a given moment, I may write about it (a restaurant or a venue) AFTER I leave, not while I am there. That is why my use of FourSquare was so short lived.
- I only give my personal address to people I know (in real life) in person or people who need to know it (like someone sending me a personal package).
- On Twitter, I follow everybody I find interesting and relevant in connection with one or more of these: Venezuela, diabetes, nonprofits, social media, music, etc. But on Facebook I only befriend people that I know, either personally or through enough of an online correspondence, to make me feel comfortable sharing with them more than I do on Twitter.
- On Facebook, I have a list of Family and another list of panas (my real-life buddies). Any personal photos (where anyone in my family appears) I only share with those two lists.
- On LinkedIn, I typically only accept invites from people I know or have worked with before.
Some of these list items have been cause for some people to get upset at me: I insist -it’s nothing personal… just my own privacy policy.
Do you think I am too paranoid? What is your online privacy policy like?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I often go through the same questions. I got into this, didn’t think anyone would notice me and my how life has changed over the past 8 years! My son was very much in the public eye when he was younger. We spoke in national media outlets. He didn’t mind finding himself when he did a google search. Now he is entering his teen years and that has changed. He is much more private and try my best to respect that.
I try to not mention him by name if possible. I do not tag any photos of him or his sibling in any venue. I have the same policy as you, Manny, on FB. I keep two lists and only family and close friends get to “see” a lot more of my life.
For some time, I kept a lot of my “online” self separate from my “real life” self by use of a screen name based on a character I created. The only people who knew enough to associate the two were people from the organization in which I’d originally developed the character T`Mana. Eventually that circle grew as I participated in a number of e-mail lists in my own name, and members of those lists moved into realtime chat via IRC and instant messaging applications.
I have a certain degree of regret that a business proposition I’d accepted a bit over a year ago required the use of, at minimum, my real first name; I’d've rather have kept that online persona separate from life-segments such as job and job search. On the other hand, life morphs into such a manner that it is hard to segment one’s life completely, using one identity for one activity sector (e.g., work) and another for a different activity sector (e.g., political activism); in the end, one person from one segment needing to know information that is generally available only to the other segment cracks the separating wall and merges the two (or more) sub-identities. (This is one reason nobody has seen “T`Mana” in public for over 20 years.)
There are certain things I do not post in mainstream social media: the names of family members (not even first names), personal contact information beyond an e-mail address (and sometimes not even that!), my physical address, and my mailing address for starters. Nevertheless, someone who is that interested in finding out more about me could discover that information fairly easily.
The other aspect of online privacy is that if you don’t expect any, you won’t be disappointed when it’s stripped away by bots, spiders, search engines, and increasingly intrusive laws. (It’s perhaps easier for those of us who started off in ham radio: everything is “in the clear”, so we usually don’t disclose our last names, phone numbers, or physical addresses.)