Online Identity: It's Your Choice

Well, well, well... so much for posting about this two weeks ago and so much for this series. June has come and gone way too fast. However, as promised I wanted to talk about how I believe personal Internet identity is all about choice and how Facebook is not bringing the downfall of marriages, employment, and digression. Wow, a pretty hefty task... I'm not sure I'm up to this right now.

I get really tired of people thinking that everyone else controls their online identity. They live in fear that an embarrassing picture of them is going to be posted online. I've actually heard of people who choose to withdraw from real world engagements because they fear that their actions will be broadcast online. The thought of their digital identity being tainted by someone else scares them to death.

To put it nicely these people are ignorant (wait... was that nice?).

Now before you respond by saying it's unfair that my actions in the digital sphere can affect those in reality and that I have no control over what other people post about me online let me proclaim fervently that you are in control of your image. You have two choices.

One: don't do anything you wouldn't want to be posted online. This does not mean that you do not attend social functions. It means that if you do not want people to see that embarrassing picture of you drunk at last night's party then don't get drunk at last nights party (or at least make sure no one takes a picture).

Two: Facebook has a handy button below everything tagged with you in it "Remove Tag". You can also ban certain people from tagging you in photos or outright ban everyone all at once. You can set it so only certain people can see your photos, statuses, posts, etc. Or you can even say that certain people can only see specific posts. Therefore ensuring that your grandmother won't know about anything that you won't want her knowing.

Ultimately you are in control of what information is available to you online. If you don't want it there don't allow it to be posted, or better yet, don't compromise your image by participating in activities contrary to what others think about you. It takes effort, time, and a quick click of the finger sometimes, but it is possible. 

Facebook and Privacy

I was talking to my wife earlier this week about our style of parenting for a paper that she wrote. We don't have any kids at the moment so it involved a lot of hypothetical situations and discussion about worst-case scenarios and a lot of tangents. One of these tangents was about a seminary lesson I had my junior year of High School. My teacher told us about "the privacy of a public place". Now this lesson was in relation to having intimate conversations while removing temptation, but it got me thinking about privacy on the Internet, especially Facebook.

The Internet is perhaps the most private public place (Or is it the most public private place?) available for the general populous today. There have been many cases of people posting private pictures online only to face real life repercussions from these images. Perhaps the most infamous of these situations was when Stacey Snyder was denied a teaching certificate when she posted a picture of herself titled "Drunken Pirate" on her Myspace page. What role does privacy play online?

Facebook has some of the most intricate privacy controls available on a social network. Every aspect of your profile page can be monitored to the point that one can assign individuals that can view (or not view) content on his or her page. However, Facebook has not always handled privacy issues with the most grace. In 2009 the launched a new privacy policy that set all users privacy settings so everyone could see everything by default. In 2006 there were protests when Facebook launched the newsfeed, and everything you did was published on one page. However, both of these incidents were handled appropriately. The news feed was left alone and people accepted it. The privacy policy rollout was apologized for and users were notified of the change.

This week there was a change in Facebook that caused quite a stir. They released a photo recognition feature to facilitate tagging in photos world wide (the service has been available in the US since January. Again, I will admit, Facebook stumbled on its release, setting everyone to allow this feature to tag pictures of themselves (except incidentally those that did not allow themselves to be tagged in any photo). The question of the day, however, is it a stumble? Why would Mark and the rest of the Facebook team want this to be an automatic feature? It couldn't possible be because it is useful and kind of awesome. It's like the Newsfeed. People got scared of the easy access of the information. In other words, they are scared of the public nature of the private place.

People want to be in control of their online identities. They want to be able to prohibit anyone from being able to disagree with them or post a semi-scandalous image of them. For good reason too. There are the Stacey Snyders in the world. There is a solution, one that I will talk about more next week: the need to constantly monitor your online identity. You decide what stays and what goes.

What are your thoughts on privacy online?