“The best way to protect your privacy is to understand that you live in public. And act accordingly.”
I tweeted this and posted it on my Facebook Wall this morning.
All the fuss and kvetching about Facebook and privacy. I think it’s time for all of us to get over ourselves a bit.
We all live in public. Each to their own degree.
- Posting on Facebook
- Tweeting
- Updating LinkedIn
- Commenting on blogs and services from The Economist to Techcrunch to Curbed to Eater to YouTube and Flickr
- Writing reviews on Amazon, Yelp, Travelocity, high school and college boards
Unless you are a spook or off-the-grid, you are there. And happily.
Google has been tracking our cookies for years, and gathering and sharing every utterance with whoever cares to set an Alert. Now Facebook is doing some of the same and more. It just happens to be on a social platform that everyone belongs to and spends countless hours a week on.
We are all socializing, sharing….and need I say, loving it. Expecting and craving attention. Benefitting from the connections. Disappointed when we are not found or recognized or Shared or Liked or Retweeted from a photo or phrase or link.
I, maybe more than most, embrace this social connected net. I see the connected upsides as inspiring and powerful and hard to imagine being without. This is life and I’m really happy about it.
I might have preferred Facebook to communicate better (they never do!). Or broken with standard service practice and asked for us to opt-in rather than opt-out (but nobody does this). Or done a better job of telling the millions how to set preferences or groups that almost no one understands or uses.
My advice to myself…and what I try to live by…is to accept that we are all in the spotlight and act as smartly as we can. We are all on this stage together.
The rules are really simple. We all know how to act in public or at a party. At work. Or on email. You never say or do what you don’t want to hear or read back. Nothing new here.
I’ll admit, things have become bit wackier and complex because not only what we publicly state or post goes on record, but also what we buy, our music playlists on Pandora and on and on. The definition of public just got super-stretched and is feeling momentarily unfamiliar. So it does with each new technology when it starts to change how we socialize and interact.
I like to think that we’ve all become celebrities of sorts to our own social world and have a personal paparazzi-like problem.
As long as we understand that most everything is transparent and that we live in the public’s eye… and act accordingly, everything else will work itself out.
