Privacy

How much of yourself do you share online?  This isn't an easy question to answer for me because it has varied throughout my life.  I've been exposed to technology from a very young age.  At age 6 I had an Amstrad CPC-464 which I learned to program in BASIC on.  There's never been a time since then that I haven't had at least one computer.  Right now there are two desktops and two laptops in my house, reluctantly I got rid of a few older computers - 3 laptops and 3 desktops to be exact - because they were taking up space.  I stripped them for parts of course before I had the rest taken to an electronics dump.  Being exposed to technology for so long has made me very conscious of what it can do - or, what it can be used for.

I first got Internet access when I was 11 years old, it was dial-up internet provided by BT Click through a pay and go service.  You got charged per minute rather than data used.  One of the first things I learned about online, from a friend of my Mum, was a site called pogo that had lots of games you could play.  Each game was accompanied by a chat room.  I focused mainly on chess and checkers [draughts as I always called it] and rose up through the leader-board on the site.  When we were creating the account for it though, my Mum's friend told me never to use my real name, because you never know who you are talking to online.  That mentality being the first impression of the Internet stuck with me for a long time, even to an extent today.

It's not like my parents were shy of technology, well, Dad was to an extent although you wouldn't think it now.  He spends most of his time online looking at cars, that's one of the things he's really interested in.  Mum prefers Facebook, and inevitably they argue over their laptop.  As a kid though, we never had Internet, and Mum didn't have to use it for her work before then.  So everything I knew I learned initially from Mum's friend.  Years later in high school I would expand on that knowledge through what little was covered in the GCSE ICT course the school ran, but to be honest it focused much more on using Microsoft Office than anything.  This was a time when Google was still relatively new.  College and University would further top up that knowledge and the rest was self taught.

I explored the internet for myself with the back of my mind echoing what I had been told.  Years later at college when various social networks of the time mainly Bebo and MySpace were the flavour of the day, I avoided them.  I chose to avoid them because I didn't like the idea of documenting my life for the world to see.  That mentality is still with me today.  Even here on this blog there are scarce details specific to my actual life and I'd rather it stayed that way.  I saw people post hundreds of pictures of drunken nights out and things, you really wouldn't - or shouldn't - want anyone to ever see.  Things which said people have long since deleted.  If I had the malice, or the malcontent to capitalise on that foresight I would have made copies of everything.  Nevertheless I could tell more or less what people would eventually delete when the regret for posting it in the first place had sunk in.  It was unreal to me the number of people in University who I saw with Facebook profiles covered in similar photos, who in their final years purged the lot to make themselves look respectable for graduating and looking for work.

All this is naieve, because it assumes that you will retain control over what you post, and that's just not the case.  Once you put something into the public domain there's no way to prevent it being copied.  Those people on twitter who try to be funny and create original comedy and humour to share know this all too well.  The second something gains any traction it is copied and reposted to an endless stream of accounts that are only obsessed with getting as many retweets and likes as they possibly can.  Taking twitter as an example, this platform is inherently public.  It is perhaps the most public platform of all social networks, except maybe youtube.  With Twitter there are hundreds of sites that catalogue tweets and media you post.  When you delete something from twitter, if it was tweeted some time ago in all likelihood there are copies of it scattered across these sites.  One of the stupid things I often see "anon" twitter account do is post "#picslip" and a picture of themselves which they then remove after a certain time.  The reason this is stupid is because for a start, that image is still accessible to anyone who saved the direct URL of the image, twitter deletes the tweet, it does not delete the image from the content delivery network.  I have tested this in the past with tweets I posted then deleted, and 6+ months later the image is still accessible - I have previously pointed out the fact that Facebook also does this too, and that "privacy" settings on Facebook only apply to the page, not the image file.  As long as you have the direct URL you can still see the image.  It's actually possible with someone's Facebook profile ID [a string of numbers used by the API] to see every photo they ever posted even if you aren't friends with them and don't even have a Facebook account, even if they deleted the image, even if they deleted their profile.

I am not a normal person when it comes to computers and the internet as you can probably tell.  I've studied Computing through to University and I have been programming for almost as long as I can read.  I know some APIs like the back of my hand.  I know all too well what you can do when you really want to online.  The bottom line here is that if you don't want something to be public forever, don't share it online.  Period.  This is the reason I don't have social network profiles anymore, the reason I don't post an endless stream of selfies, the reason for the most part my private life is just that - private.

I know some people will call me paranoid and to be honest I don't really care.  At the end of the day you don't really know me, the real me, you only know what you have seen online of me.  If you don't know me personally you can't be sure any assumptions you have made about me are accurate, and by extension you can't even assume anything I have said in this post is actually true.  However, I can't be sure of that for you either, which is part of the reason why I take most things online at face value.  However I would draw up a point here that although you may be thinking I am abnormal for my mentality, the truth is, I am honest about what I do online.  The same can not be said of everyone and while you may look at me on one hand and another person with an endless stream of selfies and seemingly vast amounts of information about them online for you to trudge through there's a question for you to contemplate - how much of that is true? 

The bottom line here is that I try not to judge people online by how much they share, but rather by the nature of what they share.  The people on twitter who are genuine and worth following, for me, are the people who don't chase numbers.  Who aren't trying to "grow" their accounts to reach a certain number of followers or get a set number of likes - in other words people who have nothing to gain from lying.  I know that's not a guarantee they are telling the truth but it does make it more likely in my view.

I am drawn to people who don't go out of their way to depict themselves as flawless and their lives as perfect - because that right there is a massive red flag.  Nobody is happy all the time, shit happens, that's part of life.  You will have days when you feel like shit and that's perfectly normal.  I don't trust people who smile 100% of the time, it makes me think they are hiding something.  I know that sounds cynical and again, I don't care, it's just how I feel.