Being Purposeful About Your Privacy - Part 1
There are not always heroes looking out for our best interests, waiting to come to our rescue when someone has done us wrong. Protecting ourselves is something we all have to learn how to do. The digitally-connected life, however, lends itself to new issues of protection and privacy, and we need to be purposeful in how we share “ourselves” when online.
It occurred to me this afternoon that I have set-up myself to interact in four distinct ways on the Internet. I have, and still do, wrestle with how much of myself to share on this most public of public places, and quite without foresight have found that I have organized my interactions into four distinct profiles, or faces, to others on the Internet.
After thinking about what I did, I believe this is a reasonable way to structure your interactions and your “publicity” or “reachability” or “sharability” – however you want to see it – as you work with others on the Internet. We already do this with other forms of communication – we have a home address and phone number that we don’t give out to just anyone, we have a business address and phone number that we give out with less discretion, and perhaps we have a cell phone or other means of contact that we give out to only a few people (though that is not so much the case anymore with cell phones).
Privacy in the ever-more-connected world is a significant and worthy topic to consider, and worthy of a well thought-out strategy for yourself the more connected you become. Consider the recent commotion over the Google Desktop 3 release, and the feature that allows the archiving of your computer’s index on Google’s servers. Marc Orchant has an excellent analysis and discussion of this feature and the ensuing hubbub (BTW, check out Marc as he now writes for ZDNet: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant/). Marc writes:
Are there privacy implications here? Absolutely. Should you use this feature? That is entirely up to you. If you have confidential information on your PC, probably not. If you’re concerned about the government or hackers or “other litigants” gaining access to your data while it resides on Google’s servers, definitely not. Let them subpoena your PC. Which they will - and much more easily than fighting their way through Google’s army of lawyers.
Marc’s article explains why people are coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons about this particular feature in Google Desktop 3. It’s not because Google will, by default, start to store all the contents of everyone’s PC’s on their servers and then be used as a willing instrument in the government’s hands to invade our privacy. The feature is off by default and, as Marc points out, it would be much easier for the government to simply subpoena your PC than work through Google.
The point for me is that we have to be wise – informed, intelligent and purposeful – about our privacy on the Internet. How much of yourself that you share with others – and more importantly, what parts of yourself you share with which specific people – is something that we all need to consider and address.
If you do nothing, you’re simply left to the mercy of default features of the world around you. Which, in some cases, may protect your privacy, but in others may not. You won’t know, however, until you become more purposeful about your privacy.
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