In a flurry of status posts expressing outrage at Facebook's constant changes in privacy settings and the stacks of 8pt print privacy policies that fill my mailbox, I find myself asking if we've ever had this much conversation about privacy before? And, quite frankly, if it matters. After all, the whole concept of privacy is that there are things about you that people don't know. And to some extent privacy may just be an illusion.
A friend sent me a link to search for myself on a website called spokeo.com…so I did. In a matter of seconds I was able to pull up a page that had my photo, address, spouse, children, profession, value of my home and enough other items to make it feel like an FBI dossier. (For the one or two of you still reading who haven't already left to go search for yourself on Spokeo, you will be relieved to know that you can follow the privacy link to remove yourself, though since they aggregate data over time, it isn't 100%.)
The thing about Spokeo is that all of this information about me is actually already public somewhere. After all, my e-mail address is used to sign up for everything, my photo is on my company's website, my husband's name is in the searchable Texas marriage license archive and you can figure out the value of my home by calling a local real estate agent and simply asking. The thing that makes Spokeo different—and to be honest, intimidating—is that it aggregates all of that information in a single location.
The digital world doesn't hold privacy as a value and it is possible that people growing up in this condition won't even notice its loss. Like it or not, as much as we like to talk about authenticity and transparency—these values are becoming less of a goal and more of a requirement in the digital glass house we find ourselves in.
As the culture shifts from valuing privacy to valuing transparency, there are some things we have to become hyper-aware of:
Make sure you are the person you want to be in all aspects of your life. The power of social media to blend the professional and the personal eliminates the option of religion, politics, and what you do in your down time as a "personal thing." Your professional contacts will get windows into your personal life and vice versa. Make sure you have continuity in who you are.
Follow the Money. Nothing on the internet is really truly "free." Sites have to be funded somehow and most of them make their money by marketing to you. Others make their money by harvesting your information and selling it to others. Third party apps on Facebook are geared to get you to spread them to friends so they can collect their information too. Ask yourself how the site or app makes it's money. If they aren't charging and it isn't a direct marketing effort, you may not want to play.
Respect others' boundaries. Some bloggers use aliases. Others become public personalities. Whatever your online personality, it is likely that you have people in your life who have different comfort levels with public sharing of information. Make sure you clear what you share about others with them first, and realize that what you post has longevity and may have unintended consequences.
Use common sense. Tweeting that you are going to the Bahamas for two weeks is probably unwise given that Twitter allows searches by geographic location. Pleaserobme.com got started by sharing an aggregated stream of people who share that they are away from home on Twitter and Foursquare just to make the point.
Once you post, you no longer control the information. The moment you hit post on a photo, video, tweet, status update or comment, that information is public. Use wisdom.