Christian Sauvé: Self-Imposed Privacy on the Web

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU TELL?

A few (2300+) words on self-imposed privacy on the Web

"Why isn't there a picture of you on your Web Site?"

1998-2001, Christian Sauvé

[2004 Note: I wrote this years ago, and I'm not sure I still agree with all of it. Have a look at To Blog or Not to Blog? for sort-of-an-update.]

I know it's already hard to remember, but privacy was certainly a hot subject during the first months of 1998 when I wrote the first draft of this essay. Still reeling from the aftermath of the Princess Diana / Paparazzi debate (do celebrities have a "right" to privacy?), we stumbled upon the Clinton / Lewinsky affair (do presidents have a "right" to privacy?). Elsewhere, everyone was still concerned about the government's efforts to control cryptography (itself one of the most important privacy tools), the corporations' intent to control their employee's private lives (Internet usage, dangerous hobbies, drug usage, health regimes, etc...) and the obvious debates over the use of video cameras in public areas.⁽¹⁾

At the same time, a popular film pushed the conceptual limits of non-privacy while simultaneously managing to make a substantial amount of money. THE TRUMAN SHOW asked; What If a whole man's life was filmed and broadcast to the world? What about the viewers?

All of which, finally, doesn't have a lot to do with the subject of this essay, which is What You Shouldn't Put on Your Web Site. After all, you have total control, while Diana Spencer, William Clinton and Truman Burbank didn't have a lot of choice in seeing their lives on TV.

Really?

Closer examination exonerates Truman Burbank⁽²⁾ but isn't so kind to Diana Spencer and William Jefferson Clinton. Spencer was a creature made by and for the media. I have never found her particularly meritorious... but that's another essay. Still, Spencer couldn't fade away from the media because she couldn't! Her charities, her lifestyle... even her love life depended on being seen on as many tabloid newspaper covers as possible.

Live by the camera, die by the camera. Or, as it turned out, die by a drunken driver going well above the speed limit in a tunnel while not wearing your seatbelt. Whatever. Back to our subject.

Similarly, William Jefferson Clinton was already the president of what is modestly known as the most powerful nation on Earth when he decided to have what he acknowledged to be "an unacceptable relation" with an employee roughly the age of his daughter. If that doesn't constitute a proof of stupidity big enough to impeach him...⁽³⁾

Still, you have to be smart. Clinton did an incredibly stupid thing and got caught. (Like Dostoevsky's Rastolnikov in Crime and Punishment, we get the feeling that he's only sorry because he was caught, not because he thinks it was wrong.⁽⁴⁾) The righteous have few things to fear from public disclosure. You, me; do we really have such interesting skeletons in our closets? We may think that yes, but I have the impression that a telepath would be bored stiff by what we think are our most illicit thoughts. We're far less fascinating than we think we are.

(Digression; I have always liked David Brin's idea to put cameras basically everywhere. Then, you give access to all cameras to everyone, without restriction. Okay, so the policemen can see everything you do, but on the other hand you can see everything they do. Sort of a Mutually Assured Destruction mentality as applied to privacy. Grab a copy of Brin's The Transparent Society for a fascinating in-depth explanation of the concept.)

(Another digression: It's always interesting to stop for a moment and consider what could be the single most damaging thing people could know about you if they knew everything. Most of it goes back to sex, I guess.)

Having thus established that people have a choice and that their lives are far less interesting that what they think it is, let's blow up this argument and start arguing that you should be careful about what you're putting on your Web site.

For the purposes of this essay, let's not quibble over what makes a personal Web site. I assume that you're going to talk about yourself, your work, your family and/or your pets. (I also assume that you're nothing near a celebrity; otherwise all bets are off) Various people have various ways of talking about themselves. Most at least include their name, their photo and a list of their favorite sites. So far, mostly harmless.

But even then: A big question, as far as I remember being on the Web, is Do You Put Your Home Phone Number on the Web?

At first, it seems a good idea if you want people to contact you. But do you really want to put your number at the disposition of everyone around the world with Web access? What are you going to do when some weirdo starts calling you at three in the morning?⁽⁵⁾

Sadly, a lot of unpleasantness still depends on gender. It's getting better now that the male/female ratio is getting closer to 50/50, but there are still quite a few nuts (of both sexes) out there.

Personal example: A female friend of mine once put up a very rudimentary Web site. No photo, not a lot of personal information, but, essentially, her resume. She started getting emails from strange guys ten years her senior, "innocently" asking how she was doing, etc...

My skin crawled when I heard this. All of this from a simple resume? Goodness! Where do I turn in my Y-chromosome Membership Card?

But let's keep this anecdotal proof to what it is, and assume that psycho slashers aren't going to turn up at your door if you put only the most innocuous information on your Web site.

The problem remains that, roughly speaking, there are two separate audiences for your Home Page: Acquaintances and Strangers.

In a way, it's much easier to make your page for Strangers than for people you know. Most of us have this weird lack of self-consciousness that make us blab out very personal information to complete strangers.⁽⁶⁾ It's easy to talk about yourself to someone who doesn't know you. Spin an lie, and at least make it a good lie. You can't be held accountable for what you're saying. It's fun. It probably accounts for most of the attraction of Internet chat groups.⁽⁷⁾

On the other hand, you can't very well lie to Acquaintances, because eventually these lies will come back to haunt you. And you can't really give out too much personal information either, since who knows what they might think of you afterward... or what they'll do with it...?

There we begin to see the problem. For me, the acid test is this: What would my grandparents say if they saw my Web Site?

Shameful disclosure: They can't read English, so really the test is practically meaningless. But the spirit remain: What happens if your parents, your children, your siblings, your best friends go and check your page? Are they going to be ashamed, shocked, surprised?

One of the wisest thing I've ever heard about Usenet is that everyone, including your family, friends, boss and co-workers, can read what you're writing, and so can you. We're easily back to the cameras-for-everyone scenario: Usenet archiving sites such as www.deja.com are easily some of the most fascinating pieces of cyberspace yet, and I hope their influence will be felt for a long time.

Back to the Web, it means that you should keep in mind that your friends and acquaintances are going to look at your page, if only once. After all, if you're new to the Internet (or bored), what could be more natural that to check out the pages of people you know? With search engines, it's so easy to type in a name and get back a site...⁽⁸⁾

Let's turn the situation upside-down and discover a whole new rat nest of problems: What if you go to a friend's page and discover that s/he's put online a fairly detailed transcript of your latest confidences? Less shockingly, what if s/he tosses your name around in contexts that you would rather not approve?

(Me? Haven't had this problem yet. On my site, I take great pains in either A> Asking acquaintances for permission to name them or B> Not name them and stick to generalities. And I trust my friends to do the same.)

I always like to think that we all have implicit responsibilities built into our friendships: You are having a direct influence on your friends, and them on you. Much as they are shaping your personality, you are in turn modifying theirs, if only for a few moments. You owe them respect. That includes not putting anyone's life on the Web but your own.⁽⁹⁾

But how much of your life? Back to Acquaintances and Strangers:

This essay often caricatures Web Surfers as a lonely and antisocial breed. Surprisingly, this is often true... at least for a certain subtype. Like it or not, some people are using the Web as substitute for social contact. These are the Strangers you have to worry about. They'll stumble upon your site. They'll read it from A to Z. Their minds will feverishly construct a mental picture of you. Then the emails start.

Fortunately, I have not, as of this writing -January 2001-, received anything even remotely disturbing by email about my Web Page. All emails have been overwhelmingly courteous, intelligent and enjoyable; precisely my target audience. It's fun to know that I'm not maintaining a site in vacuum. Even estimating that only one person in a hundred will actually write, one or two emails a month make it all worthwhile.

On the other hand, I tend not to have any kind of downbeat, gloomy material that attracts antisocial personalities like parasites to a cesspool. A decidedly more... gothic friend of mine hasn't been that lucky, receiving rather pitiable messages from someone who's obviously not getting out enough. Pouring your heart out on your web page may seem like a good idea, until you start getting creepy emails from someone who's convinced that s/he's found his/her perfect soul-mate... unless that's what you want.⁽¹⁰⁾

Up to a certain point, this is an issue based on vanity. But it's not only about how you want people to perceive you, but also on what kind of people you want to deal with: Don't put in Satanist imagery on your site if you don't want to communicate with the kind of audience it will attract. (duh!) All the more reason to be yourself.

I will never advise to lie on your Web Site: To me, that's the antithesis of what a personal Web Site is about. On the other hand, some facets of your personality shouldn't be there. You should take your dark side, pack it in a little box and dump the box somewhere far away from your terminal.

Take sex, for instance. (as if there could be anything else, when you think of it...) Some people freely discuss their sex life on the Internet. I have a certain grudging respect for this lack of self-consciousness, but I'm sorry, but my own sex life -or perennial lack of one⁽¹¹⁾- is my business.

On this other hand, this is a non-issue. But like the zen parable about a tree falling in the forest, nothing on your web site is a nuisance, or potentially damaging, if no-one reads it.

But pushing it to extremes, do you need to keep an online diary? Do we want to know?

"Do we want to know?" is a good meter for what you should and shouldn't put up on your web site. Ask around if you're not sure. Ask casual (not "best") friends: they should know.

Also keep in mind that personal web sites are, at best, a highly irrelevant activity. The usefulness of such a hobby is still quite dubious.⁽¹²⁾

The point of all this being that web page designers have an enviable position: For the first time in the history of, yes, humankind⁽¹³⁾, they have access to a worldwide audience of the best intellects (read: educated, techno-savvy, fairly intelligent and literate) available, all epochs considered. At the same time, they have an absolute freedom of what to put, and what to leave out of the personality fragment that they're putting on the web.

"Less is more"

"Discretion is the better part of valour"

"People who live in glass houses..."

Doesn't that seems like a rather long-winded explanation as to why you won't find my picture anywhere on this web site?

Finally, I'd like to close this essay with Gauthier's Law of Cyberpresence:

"The more time people spend on their Web life, the less they have for a real one."

(1998, Éric Gauthier)

...and on this note, I'm out of here.

Agree? Disagree? Suggestions? Want to read more essays like this one? Email Christian Sauvé as soon as you feel like it!

Neither William Jefferson Clinton, Diana Spencer or Truman Burbank were consulted in the making of this essay.

Endnotes:

1. Ironically, the initial furor about video cameras in public areas has considerably abated in recent years. Blame it on crime, desensitization or bigger threats to privacy...

2. We won't talk about his audience here, even though it's the most interesting component of THE TRUMAN SHOW: What would be their opinion of Truman; human, friend, freak, object? What kind of society would be voyeuristic enough to spy on one man's life? Could it be... us? Wasn't there a short-lived TV show called Survivor...?

3. When all will have been said and done, we'll still have to admit that at the very least *he* had a good time for a while!

4. I'm showing off. Not only is Crime and Punishment the only Dostoevsky book I've ever read, that's the only thing I remember from it!

5. I keep thinking of Spider Robinson's harrowing experience with a would-be suicidal loser, as described in Harlan Ellison's frightening article "Xenogenesis". Scary stuff, to have someone dump his karma on you at 3 o'clock in the morning. Incidentally, this article has disturbing implications for *any* kind of celebrity, even low-grade celebrity like Science-Fiction writers. Something to think about, because the attractiveness of a celebrity is the feeling that we know them. And guess what the aim of a web site is...? Right.

6. For instance; complete strangers sitting side-by-side during a long bus trip, pouring their heart to each other, confident that come dusk (or dawn), they'll never see each other again... this ever happened to you?

7. Before anyone asks: I do *not* frequent chat groups. I have a problem with aliases and pseudonyms: anonymity doesn't have any credibility. So there.

8. This essay is already too long as it is to discuss the subtleties of EgoSurfing --looking for your name and links to your site on search engines and making sure they're in contexts that you approve.

9. In the early days of search engines, I had a hair-raising discussion with a friend about the possibility of making up a hate-page about his ex-girlfriend. Then, if ever someone entered her name on a search engine --bang!, the hate-page. Fortunately, nothing came out of the idea -a good thing, since both the guy and his ex remained friends of mine!- but I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere on the Web lies something like that. Or if it's an idea that eventually catches on. Up to a certain point, this already exists for celebrities ("I hate Leonardo DeCaprio!") or organizations such as scientology.

10. There's no accounting for taste!

11. I'm not really good at practicing what I preach, right?

12. Then why am I spending time writing this...? *sigh*...

13. Hyperboles exist to be abused.