This all brings us to my last point…

Don’t ever assume that anything you express on the Internet is private. Be it e-mail, web forums, IP based phone calls, anything. As the world becomes more connected and employers, governments and others feel the need to monitor you as a risk (warranted or not), you will have less privacy in your life. In fact you have less privacy now than you could ever possibly suspect. Consider the little intrusions such as how banks now monitor your Debit/Credit card activity with automated systems that do predictive analysis of your spending behavior and if something goes outside the prediction curve your card will be blocked or you will get a phone call from a CSR (phone rep) to verify that it really is you buying a new high-end TV on your debit card mid pay cycle. This is all done in order to reduce fraud and protect your money… but none-the-less, we are all subject to it already.

And worse yet, if there is money to made from that data, it is often already being sold to other companies who cross reference it with other data to figure out the optimal time to send you promotional offers in the mail. You may think I’m being cynical but this type activity is old news. Here is a good resource site to start you off on the subject, specifically this document “Customer Acquisition and Data Mining“. Here’s a quote:

“More complicated overlays are also possible. Customers can be matched against purchase, response, and other detailed data that the data vendors collect and refine. This data comes from a variety of sources including retailers, state and local governments, and the customers themselves. If you are mailing out a car accessories catalog, it might be useful to overlay information (make, model, year) about any known cars that people on the prospect list might have registered with their department of motor vehicles.”

Also, as I mentioned previously MySpace, LinkedIn, FaceBook and others allow third parties to review your account data and private, protected pages all the time without any kind of legal overview. You agreed to it when you (often carelessly) pressed the “I agree” button when you created your account. In fact just about every online service you’ve ever signed up with probably has a clause in the EULA/Terms & Conditions about sharing your personal information which you agreed to when you checked that box and hit submit.

Beyond that, you should always remember that everything you do on the Internet or an Intranet is recorded in some manner. Take for instance the simple (and default) behavior of a web server recording a log of every file it delivers and the IP address of every computer that the file was delivered to. It is how the owner of that log file handles the data that they store that ultimately impacts your privacy, hence some of the rules that have been fiercely debated across Europe regarding this very subject. Just this last October (2008) yet another ruling occurred in Germany indicating that an IP address is not personal data. I’m sure next month it will change again.

Additionally, new ways are always being invented to index and parse the web. It’s only a matter of time before either archive.org or some other company working with them develops a way to perform web searches across their database. Then that long gone web site where you thoroughly embarrassed yourself may come back to life and become discoverable again some day in the future.

In regards to modern technology, the idea of Privacy is nothing more than a quaint religion at this point in history and to bring this all full circle to the persona issue (now that I’ve completely scared you to death in the process) remember this… if your doing something online that you don’t want the whole world to know about, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.

…sounds like advice from Grandma…

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

This isn’t meant to scare you. Posting things on the Internet isn’t really a big deal as long as you’re not a dork about it. Just use some common sense and be civil with people. The Golden Rule is always good way to go when in doubt.

Granted the things you say on a corporate Intranet aren’t likely to linger in cyberspace forever, but even there you should always adhere to your companies Code of Conduct or you’re like to find yourself under disciplinary action at best, out of a job or worse.

A scary thing though (and this is where persona plays into things) is that some companies now evaluate potential new hires based on the results of what can be found about someone in an Internet search. And just because you marked your MySpace or Facebook profile as private is really not relevant because there are agencies that have contract agreements with these sites that allow your prospective university or employer to access all of your content. As companies get more savvy to this (unless something happens to the contrary) expect even more privacy violations, and more digging. In reality, all it takes is a credit card number and your first and last name to dig up more information on you than you could ever think possible.

But Web pages aside, you should always be aware that whatever you write in a public space is likely to resurface at some point in time. Whether or not people care is a whole other matter. Just because you posted some comment to some forum or other that might be embarrassing ten years ago, don’t think it can’t come back to haunt you.

Personally, I’ve always tried to be reasonable when I’m online. I’m sure there are a couple of places where you can find me engaged in some argument about something or other (I think there is one out there where I have an argument over some 3-D gaming technology). But, I think the best surprise example from my own life has to be this item which is now recorded for all posterity on Google Groups.

It’s nothing embarrassing, but here’s the history. In 1993 when UUCP (News groups), IRC (internet chat), FTP repositories (file sharing) and Gopher (pre-WWW hypertext) where still the predominant communication systems on the Internet, I was contributing to some of the early video game related newsgroups through a local Columbus, Ohio based BBS system called BlueMoon BBS. This BBS was a UUCP node which means that it was connected to the Internet newsgroups. I only posted a dozen or so times through this site and had completely forgotten about it until one day when Google announced that they had located backup tapes of all Internet Newsgroup posts going back to 1981 and were now going to put them online in a searchable format.

That was pretty cool. From there, me and several thousand people immediately started searching for our old posts to see how far back we could locate ourselves. I had never in my wildest dreames imagined this stuff would end up on the web, but there it was. Good thing I wasn’t a newsgroup troll.

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

In the on-line world something amazing happened. Anonymity.

In actuality, true anonymity on the Internet is a rare commodity. Just because you created a MySpace page with the username PuppyHunter342 and posted a photo of your neighbor’s cat on your profile, doesn’t mean someone can’t figure out who you are with enough resources. But just like the plastic lock on a file cabinet, it’s enough to keep the passing acquaintance from finding out.

In practice though many researchers have found that the key problem this has created (in part) is that people feel more liberated to show their at home self in public, or in many cases project their internal voice out into their communications much like a free writing exercise. You don’t know me, I don’t know you and in fact I may not even exist beyond the words you’re reading on this page, so the sense of social repercussions never even comes into play if you decide to write a rant in the comments. At worst, in some peoples minds, they’re simply writing a comment to someone. Not generating yet one more piece of electronic documentation for forming their online identity.

Beyond that, I personally think this may happen because most people interact on the Internet from home on in the privacy of their office space where they are conversing or thinking with their family/internal tone and then using that same voice as they type. This probably wasn’t the best thing to happen.

People like to categorize things as I mentioned at the start of this series. You’re going to be categorized, like it not, so why handicap yourself out of the gate. This is a hard lesson that most people only understand much too late when it comes to living an on-line life (oh nooes, that Facebook photo of you puking from a drunken stupor at that party may come back to haunt you some day).

When you think about it, while this perceived anonymity is a double edged sword it also presents humanity with an amazing gift. The ability to transcend preconceived stereotypes… Well… as long as you’re thoughtful of what you write and where you write it. But even then other people will still try to stereotype you (from casual observation, to academic review).

The perfect example of this self definition would be the growing realm of Virtual Worlds. You can be tall, short, male, female, black, white, green or purple. You can be an extremely unpopular person in the real world, but in a virtual world you can be that Sharp Dressed Man who is eloquent and has all the right connections. Nobody ever has to know unless you tell them.

Most people don’t think about all of this when the venture out to the wide world of the Internet but it’s even more important now than ever to be aware of this issue because of my next point…

…Persistence…

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

So… who did you pick? Why did you pick that person?

What assumptions did you make about these people based simply on appearances? Even if you elected to talk to neither and walked to the next bus stop, you have just stereotyped two people and modified your behavior based on those stereotypes.

If you spent any time thinking about this you may have come to realize that there is no good answer here.

My point here is that a persona may or may not have anything to do with who a person really is. In fact, who a person really is is a wholly subjective exercise even when conducted by internal reflection (eg, “finding yourself”).

When you interact with anyone, you are marketing your persona, or in other words your personal brand. You may want people to like you so you put on makeup. You may want to be ignored by people so you wear dingy clothes when you go shopping. All of this applies to the online world as well.

Almost every teenager at some point explores this in high school by adopting the fashion common among their peer group. You know… goth kids, preps, etc…

In the off-line world (or as cyberpunk fans call it, Meatspace), people are often limited to what personas they can adopt purely by their physical appearance. But, given enough guile, money, education and peer group affiliations (not necessarily in that order) people can sometimes transcend stereotypes.

So what does this mean in the on-line world? Oh my… You’ll have to come back to find out.

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

There are three distinct issues that should be addressed by anyone looking to engage in social media that are generally under appreciated or overlooked by people when they present themselves on the Internet.

The key words related to these elements are Privacy, Personas and Persistence.

Let’s start with probably the easiest of those to tackle, Personas.

What is a persona? A persona is the image of yourself that you project to the world and therefore is the image of you formed by your audience, be they your next door neighbor or a million TV viewers. It is who people think you are and there are many factors that prejudice your persona even in a real-world face to face engagement.

For the greater part of the 20th Century people in many cultures only had to worry about managing at most two to four personas in their day to day lives; their “at home and unguarded image”, their “work image”, in some cases their “out on the town/with friends” image and let’s not forget their internal voice. For people in the Entertainment industry or in visible leadership roles, some of these frequently blur.

Let’s take for example the actor Mel Gibson. For the greater part of the 1980′s and 1990′s he presented a public persona of a strong alpha male role through his performances. His personal beliefs and opinions mattered little or were unknowable to the general population. Some people aspired to be like him… or really more like the roles he played in movies (his work image). Then there came a point in his life where his perceived personal beliefs on religion and ethnicity became public (these were parts of his private at home persona). This eventually led to his public/work persona evolving into an image of someone who appeared to be a representative for religious extremism. For some people this enhanced his image, for others it was detrimental.

The human brain by design performs pattern recognition. In order to optimize day to day living, your brain collates patterns into trends which in some cases are the basis for stereotypes (from Greek: stereo + týpos = “solid impression”). While stereotypes have a bad reputation due to their common use as a derogatory, like it or not your brain actively develops and validates these profiles. They are a critical aspect of being human and impact how you live and who you interact with.

I will provide two examples to illustrate. Let’s take two males situated at a bus stop in a major U.S. city as our backdrop for this thought exercise. You walk up to the bus stop and see:

• Individual #1 – this person is wearing work dungarees that covered with motor oil and dirt. The person is clean shaven but his hair is disheveled. He is holding a dirty box and smells slightly of sweat.
• Individual #2 – this person is wearing a clean business suit. He is clean shaven and hair groomed. He smells of cologne and is carrying a briefcase.

Who would you engage into conversation with? Why?

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]