Current Hesitations
I had a slightly harrowing digital privacy experience recently, and it has been overwhelming my ability to post.
I mentioned that we are moving. What I did not mention is that my future landlady is a software engineer at google. Naturally, a google employee would google their future tenants. This site is the first hit for Paul Oppenheim. I intended it to be. That’s how I get such crazy mad street cred, on teh intarnets.
Not only can anyone find me online easily, but that information is available exactly how I posted it, forever. I edited my address out of my blog. Despite the convenience, I will not be posting my next address here either. Right now my policy is electronic identifiers good, real-world identifiers bad. How little of the real world should I talk about? At what point do my words become irrelevant?
It’s a tough line, the balance of convenience, communication, privacy, and safety. I want to give you my opinion on things that bother me. Will my opinion be used against me? Will it keep me from getting a house? A job? Would I want that house or job anyway? Will my opinion even be valid in a year, or will it just be embarrassing? Will my post about my sister’s cancer be used to deny me health insurance in the future? Is that legal, and will it happen anyway if it isn’t?
Should I be such an e-coward? I really want to say ‘i just don’t give a fuck’ but will my grandma sympathize with a hideously dated Eminem quote? Will my future loan officer? Will we ever have the right to not have our personal communications used against us? Is this even personal communication, or is it public?
Could one of my readers please make me feel like I’m being silly? Everyday I feel more and more that communicating publicly on the internet is too big of a liability.
June 8th, 2006 at 6:34 am
Blogging is public communication. The software you use is “WordPress,” and its name describes its function. Using the web and blog software to communicate with friends and family is the technology equivalent of setting up an AM radio station to make a phone call.
On the other hand, why not? The only downside is having to accept the public aspect. Blogging presupposes the Eminem attitude of not giving a fuck, of determining to act as a public figure. The web’s gift is that anybody can be a public voice. That is its primary and fundamental fuction. Blogging is primarily a public monologue; my comment here is a “reply” in all that meaning, subordinated below your homepage and clumped with all the other replies under your posts. Since a blog is a monologue and not a message board, you have the luxury of viewing your posts ambiguously as either diary entries or as rants shouted down from the rooftop. But pragmatically, to the rest of the world, it’s both — and nobody will feel guilty for reading the diary pages you throw down to them.
So, you’ve always been liable. You need either to make your communication less public (password it or whatever) or to embrace the public nature of it and view yourself as a public figure. After all, the underlying conceit of a blog is that your words ought to be, for whatever reason, available to the world, and the goal of a blog post is to be read by the world.
June 8th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
I like the AM radio concept, but it’s worse than that. It’s an broadcast being recorded and archived for eternity, more like a court transcript. Aside from all the people who tune in, there are machines that index and archive the world’s internet content constantly. The people I hand the diary pages to from my rooftop are taking them to the Smithsonian.
But everyone else is playing the same game by the same rules. So why do I care? I’m dumb. I tied this blog to my full legal name. I used to have a handle online because of this exact scenario. I could also skip being casual and take this to be the world-watchable medium that it is. That doesn’t sound fun though, and it sure doesn’t make mass updates any easier.
I figured you wouldn’t be the one to tell me to just lighten up. You know the curse of written eternity better than I do, I just don’t want to bear it. Waaaaaa.