This is mainly about the chit-chat kind of message boards, where you make friends with a smallish group on a thread and talk back and forth about “whatever” for months and years… And all of your old posts can be accessed by anyone who wants to click on your name and read them.
My feeling is that people do not realize how over time they are basically putting an unsigned personal diary out there for anybody to see, friend or foe. It seems that it could be a very, very bad idea, the kind of thing that isn’t a problem until it’s a problem.
You do know our profiles are anonymous, right? I mean, unless you use an e-mail address like “firstname_lastname@stalkme.com”, it’s not a big deal.
That said, I’ve been to several OrlanDopeFests, and there are at least a dozen current and former Dopers who know what I look like and where I live (more or less). So what? They’re friends.
Can you say more about why you think it’s a bad idea?
I think that, in a very short time and maybe even already, “privacy” will take on an entirely different meaning than the one it has for my mother.
I mean, the woman has her name, address and phone number published in the phone book, and has for 50 years, but she’s afraid someone might find out her email address? That doesn’t make any bit of sense to me.
There are cameras everywhere on the streets, taking your picture and your license plate. The ATM you take money out of has your picture and your bank account info, including your PIN. We’re paying companies to track our location via Onstar and tollway devices and cellphones, in the name of safety and convenience and telling our friends where we’re at on Facebook.
Privacy in the digital age seems to be much more about protecting your information from people trying to sell you things, not the world at large.
Once everyone looking for a job has a picture of them somewhere on the internet holding a red cup of beer at a kegger, it will be a lot harder to justify firing people because of those pictures. I think we’re nearly there.
I noticed but don’t really care. I’ve used my wife’s name, my daughter’s name, hell, my screen name is first name, last initial. In a post a week or two ago I debated a hypothetical tax situation using my own income and tax brackets.
If somebody cares enough to collate all this information as to get a picture of who and what “JohnT” is like, by all means go ahead. Won’t chap my ass.
I just don’t say anything that I really wouldn’t want to be widely known. I might say things that would be a little embarrassing because I have moderate confidence my public life won’t intersect with this, but nothing that would ruin my world or mortify me.
Good points, Why Not, and a lot of it may be a generational thing.
Why it gives me the creeps- I feel like over time, if you are one who enjoys being on a friendly close-knit thread, you are basically putting a sort of personal journal out there without realizing it, like I said. People like to say just watch what you say, but:
No, they really don’t, not over time and among online friends. Plus if you were that careful to not say anything personal or identifying, you wouldn’t really be participating. So to me, that sounds good but isn’t accurate. And:
There are many more ways to identify someone than just by their real name. So I picture all the ways it might get into the wrong hands- anybody you would not want to print it all out and hand it to- employers, family, friends, enemies, online stalkers, who knows, even burglars. Yikes.
Yet, whenever it comes up, usually the consensus just seems to be a quick “watch what you say.” Nobody else seems to be concerned with it, which surprises me.
I’ve been on these boards for the last ten years (although, admittedly, not as active in the last two years or so as I used to be) with my real name as my user name. I don’t have a problem with people knowing about my life – if I did, I wouldn’t be posting it under my real name.
Nothing that I say here on these boards is something you wouldn’t know about me if you knew me in person. I make sure not to post anything I wouldn’t want the whole world knowing about, I don’t post anything sensitive (like my social security number, salary, date of birth or anything like that) that I would normally keep secret. In other words, I use some common sense about what to post and what not to post.
I can honestly say that in the last ten years or so, I have gained by being “out there,” not lost.
I’m not sure about gender but definitely age. Or maybe it is internet experience overall, and not age directly.
I notice that some less tech-savvy posters (who tend to be older but not always) on a crafting message board can be incredibly naive about what they post on the internet. They will literally say whatever and then freak out when they find out that OMG message boards are on the internet. delete delete delete!!! Even here we have to remind people all the time not to discuss the details of a legal dispute (like a divorce). The difference is here someone will straight up say “you should not discuss that in a public forum.” If a whole group of naive people are assembled for chitchat, its not going to occur to them. It may be that internet-naive types gravitate towards smaller “community feeling” message boards for the false sense of security they bring, when they would really be “safer” in a larger community where a slight uncomfortability would sort of rein them in…
I have a personal web site that has stuff that would blanch the faces of the folks in HR far more than stuff I’ve posted in here. And it’s less anonymous.
I refused to be haunted by the possibility of secret personal stuff coming out of closets. So I’m out and unapologetic about all of it and there’s so much of it that’s unconventional that it overdoses most folks and they decide I’m making 9/10ths of it up and that I’m probably quite normal and boring.
I think most people are aware of the obvious, but sometimes the online things sneak up on you.
One thing is that people have a tendency to reuse names. So you may think “Ok I’m Mr Coyote” and no one would know. Till you go to your job and use Mr Coyote as a login name there or a password.
Then someone decides to google “Mr Coyote” and all of a sudden they can put the two together.
Oddly enough this may backfire. I have a very unique last name. I can only find six others in searches with my exact last name. It has a lot of spelling variants though.
But oddly enough in 1999 on Usenet my name crops up. Oh nothing really odd, except it’s not me. I find it really odd that my name is attached there. It’s highly unlikely someone just picked my name at random. And I have no idea how it got there. It’s six odd posts on Usenet, and they’re really just passing comments, but I didn’t make them. But it’s something to wonder about.
I voted yes. For me, it’s the prevalence of public polls - for some reason I keep thinking that people are just gathering data that they’re plugging into greasemonkey scripts so that they can cross-reference any possible inconsistencies in your posts. It’s totally paranoid, but it’s easy enough to just not vote in public polls.
