• ABOUT
• CONTACT
• SUBSCRIBE
• HOME

Monday, March 5, 2007

HOW TO: Remain Private in Public.

filed under: HOW TO: by Lux Nightmare

Ducky taught me to be careful.

“Don’t tell them any identifying information about yourself,” she said. “Don’t even mention the name of your school.”

Don’t say the name Columbia. Call it “my school,” call it “the Ivy League school,” call it something vague, something untraceable.

“Someone could show up at your school and just wait outside the gates for you,” she said.

It had happened before. It had happened to her. You couldn’t be too careful.

This is how I learned to navigate the Internet: don’t tell anyone where you work. Don’t tell anyone where you live. Don’t tell anyone where to find you at any time, or what your real name is, or what anyone’s real name is, for that matter.

Everything else is fair game.

And I do mean everything.

People think I’m not a private person. There’s good reason for that: at different points in time, I’ve written about my sex life, posted naked pictures of myself, written about my history with depression, written about therapy, written about self-injury, written in detail about my relationships. There’s very little that goes on in my head that I’m not willing to write about, that I’m not willing to put out into the world in some form.

People see this and think that I don’t care about my privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not that I don’t value privacy: it’s that I have a very specific notion of what “privacy” means.

The first time I saw a Plazes map on a friend’s website, I was shocked. The map – a brightly colored Flash applet – purported to tell me (and, well, the entire world) exactly where my friend was at any given time (assuming, of course, that said friend kept Plazes abreast of his whereabouts). More shocking still was the discovery that he’d added his home as a Plazes location, allowing random passersby to locate exactly where he lived.

The idea of publishing my home address online struck me as a greater violation of privacy than, well, just about anything I’ve ever done. Giving someone the ability to locate me, to enter my personal sphere in a very real way, has always felt like a much greater sign of trust than handing out facts about my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Random strangers may know what I look like naked, may know about my feelings on various sexual acts, may be aware of the details of my personal traumas. But on their own, these things are no more than free-floating bits of information: knowing information about my life is not the same as knowing me. I maintain my privacy by cordoning off salient information about my “real” life from the Internet: by using a pseudonym, by keeping my address under wraps, by affording the same protections to anyone I write about.

The Internet begs us to give of ourselves. It wants our thoughts, our feelings, our stories, our pictures, our resumes, our locations, our wants, our needs, our likes, our dislikes: it wants everything we have to give, as frequently as we can manage to give it. And we want to give to the Internet: because we want to feel special, because we want to document our lives, because we want to network, because we want to be a part of something larger.

It’s possible, more and more, to live your entire life in public: to broadcast every aspect of every minute, to publicize every single thought through a wide variety of media. The more opportunities we gain to live in public, the more valuable privacy – however we define it – becomes. Living in public doesn’t necessitate the sacrifice of a private self: it just requires us to make careful choices about how much, and what, and when, and where, we publicize, put out, and share ourselves.

Comments