We talk about transparency a great deal, especially in relation to blogging, as in being open about who you are and what you do.
The flip side is too much transparency, illustrated by a thoughtful article in Business Week on the real risks about being too open about yourself where anyone can find anything about you on the internet:
[…] Today there are two of you. There’s the analog, warm-blooded version: the person who presses flesh at business conferences and interprets the corporate kabuki in meetings. Then there’s the online you, your digital doppelgänger; that’s the one that is growing larger and more impossible to control every day. Because anyone, anywhere, at any time can say anything about you on the Web, reputations are scarily open-source. And because entire companies dedicate themselves to recording every inch of information on the Web, it’s becoming difficult to unplug from the Google matrix, let alone make anything on the Internet go away.
4 responses to “You are what you’re Googled”
I think the problem is not so much what you write about yourself, if you’re clever you can pretty much control that.
The problem is more what others write or publish about you, as you have little to no control about that. As soon as somebody releases a picture of you being drunk at a party (for example) on to the web that’s it, it’s out there. You have almost no chance of ever removing that picture again.
While the BW article is primarily about what others can say about you, Armin, I think it cuts both ways (a point I didn’t make clearly anough in the post).
It constantly amazes me the extent of personal information some people openly disclose about themselves on blogs and websites. Usually far too much, in my view. For instance, I came across a blog last week where the author has his social security number up there!
That just makes it dead easy for ID thieves to do their work.
Your Two-Minute Tuesday Roundup…
I know you’re super busy today, so we’ll keep today’s menu simple. Here are today’s best reads: Corporate Blogging & Strategy: Elizabeth Albrycht’s “Strategy: When To Use Blogs”. Customer Experience: Chris Carfi’s “Sprint, you’re off to a rou…
Agree with you on the sensitive information (e.g. social security numbers and id theft).
Adding a slightly different angle, here’s a manual trackback to my ‘Whiter Than White’ entry. I think in a way these concerns are going too far and might lead to a development I’m not too happy about.