The name's Burn...Cock... burn...
I live like a free spirit on the internets. I have nary a care for my privacy, and I publish a ton of stuff about myself on the internet — pictures, my thoughts, my friends, even the music I listen to. The downside is that anyone with a Google handy (and believe me, Microsoft... Yahoo...) can look me up and find out all sorts of stuff about me.
I try not to publish details, like names of friends (unless they don’t mind) or dates or places, but someone who wanted to steal my identity would have a fair bit of circumstantial evidence. It would also mean I don’t have much of a private life. I see this as a good thing for two reasons:
First, it means my identity needs to be stronger. All the way from financial institutions to the government all the way down to people I meet at parties. They should all need to be more convinced I am who I say I am as opposed to less. It’s kind of disconcerting that someone can socially engineer their way into, say, my mobile phone plan and change it arbitrarily simply by knowing my date of birth and my mother’s maiden name. Having more information like this readily available about a ton of people on the internet will make this less likely.
At parties, if someone is trying to pick up by claiming they’re a nobel peace prize winner, it means that “the ladies” will simply not believe them without some proof of identity, giving someone cute, honest, and slightly shy guys a chance (!!).
Secondly, I’m hoping it turns into social currency to have your life available on the internet. I’m hoping eventually that googling someone’s name and finding nothing will make them inherently untrustworthy. I have my life for all to see. You may not like it, but that dude who has no internet profile could be a mad cow rapist.
I know, does he rape mad cows or is he mad for non-cow-sodomic reasons and merely rapes ordinary cows. If he had a blog you could find out!
I’m mentioning this beause something interesting happened yesterday. My coach (who I’m going to call “boss” because the vibe of that is more relevant to others) found out about this nifty webnets called “facebook”, and decided to join. Now I’m wondering whether I should be more self-censoring when writing my material. Because of what I’ve written above, the answer is “no”. However, the problem is that my entire approach is under question here. This blog isn’t just readable by my immediate boss right now, but any prior and future bosses as well.
It like my world-view shaken, not stirred...