Privacy has always been a real concern of mine. Those who know me may doubt this statement given my willingness to be interviewed by the press at certain points, but I can guarantee you that such "lapses" were actually thought-out sacrifices of privacy in the name of other stronger convictions (like work-democracy).
Still, trying to pass myself off as someone who values privacy to the extent I claim is a hard sell given my fondness for the Internet and certain social networking tools. For example, I maintained a weblog from July of 2001 through this past New Year, I have posted close to 1700 photographs to Flickr, and I maintain a Facebook account. However, that weblog was password-protected and registered under an alias, all but two of my Flickr pictures are "private" and that account is also registered under an alias, and my Facebook account is registered under a pseudonym (and I'm am very careful about allowing photographs of myself to be tagged, have posted false personal information, and have deleted all personal interests in lieu of recent changes in Facebook privacy policy). As such, if you do Google my name, you get a bunch of pages about my father, a couple links to articles relevant to collective bargaining efforts at the library, and little else. But if you figure out my aliases, then you get a lot more. I guess that's the trade-off: you either accept some intrusions of privacy as a 21st century "necessary evil", or you end up isolating yourself.
A couple months ago I read a book by J.J. Luna entitled How to Be Invisible: The Essential Guide to Protecting Your Personal Privacy. More than any of the links listed in the Thing 19 instructions, this book really drove home the point that computers are the bane of those seeking privacy. Seriously. Before the Internet, yes, you could access some information about a person via County Clerk offices and old phone books, but the process of tracking down information on a person was not nearly as easy as it is now given our propensity for not only posting information about ourselves online, but because governments, businesses, and organizations are posting information about us online (and oftentimes sharing it with other businesses and organizations). In addition, so much commerce takes place via the web these days--booking flights, buying books and other sundries, eBay, email, banking, and the placement of library holds--that to shun the web is to limit one's communication and purchasing options immensely. Indeed, all such Internet transactions are logged and stored on a server somewhere. If we lived in a country with a truly totalitarian government (unlike the marginally fascist government in Washington), we'd be, for lack of a better word, screwed. And the truly frightening thing is that there is a fairly vocal minority hell-bent on empowering corporations and eliminating government regulatory bodies. If this group has their way, well then you can kiss the last vestiges of your privacy goodbye.
Political rants aside, I would say that while the articles were all very enlightening, my favorite read from this Thing was the one describing how to become (mostly) Google-free. I gotta admit, I love Gmail, and I'm also very reluctant to force all of my contacts to update their address books (yet again), but Scroogle was cool--as were some of the alternatives to popular Google tools. Other suggestions I liked from the other articles: using a web browser other than Internet Explorer, using two email addresses (I actually maintain seven), and the most important: that a healthy dose of paranoia is a good thing.
When all is said and done, I would love to delete all of my accounts and this blog when I'm done, but, alas, I feel that I'm obliged to leave it up. I am, after all, the guy who's in charge of it all.
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