by Jared Goralnick
In this entry I discuss the fine line between convenience and sharing too much online. In particular, I’m following up to my entry on social bookmarking…something handy but potentially revealing. In the very end, I also point out how the same can apply to posting reviews on Amazon, using online support forums, and other seemingly innocuous online activities.
I began using del.icio.us and ma.gnolia to keep track of articles I’ve enjoyed. While in the past I had used browser bookmarks for pages to which I knew I’d return, these sites offered convenient ways to maintain a richly searchable history of what’s interested me over time. However, I immediately found myself debating how to describe my entries and which entries I tagged…
Let me first explain why I began using both del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. For a long time now I’ve consciously separated my business and personal activities online. I have different email addresses, websites, screennames, and now bookmark lists. Don’t get me wrong, someone can easily find the other me online, but I’d rather them search for it than dangle it under their nose.
Today I was reading a great article in the Washington Post on a religiously-charged topic. I was about to tag the article to my personal bookmark list, but realized that I wasn’t comfortable sharing that link with people unfamiliar with my beliefs. Fortunately, ma.gnolia has a checkbox for keeping a link private..but once again I found myself considering just how much information we want to store in the public domain.
To the best of my knowledge, del.icio.us does not offer a way to mark an entry as private. For most people and most bookmarks this seems to be fine. But it’s not completely fine, and here’s why…
It takes time and effort, but it’s often easy to find out a lot of information about people online. Maybe it’s a possible employer, a guy/girl you met at a bar, someone considering your business, or a program reviewing your application…what do you want them to see?
Be careful. Even when you make an effort to disguise your activities, it’s very easy to make a mistake. There are countless stories of the writers of anonymous blogs being discovered. And I have many friends who don’t share their last name on their sites…but make allusions that, if someone were interested, wouldn’t be too hard to unravel. It’s not just true with blogs either–most people simply don’t realize just how easy it is to find out what people do online.
Consider the more mild activities we perform regularly–filling out profiles, using social bookmarking, reviewing items on Amazon, commenting on blogs, posting on help forums, and selling items on ebay. If you use a screenname to mask your identity, is it a screenname that you’ve used in other places, too? Also bear in mind that should you decide you don’t want a particular posting displayed, many of these environments don’t offer an option of withdrawing your entry. Just consider this next time you share information online…
Soon I’m going to follow up with suggestions on how to use these tools with LESS fear of someone tying it back to your identity…
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I like that you see how privacy and identity are linked together. In Ma.gnolia, we also delay showing any new bookmark in the public recent bookmarks lists in order to give some time to flip the privacy switch if you forgot to do so when adding the bookmark. This prevents a simple mistake from becoming an embarassing moment, no matter how short.
That’s great to know, Todd. I’m going to add that thought to my post about del.icio.us, as it give more of an incentive for folks to consider your site, as well.
Thanks for taking the time to follow up.