Views on Privacy?

[Dynaknights]

I was looking through @citizenalex's profile and site, which made me wonder how people feel about privacy nowadays, of all things.

I'm nowhere near old enough to know how exactly how people's views on internet privacy have changed throughout the years, but I remember people being at least a little more wary in the 2010s compared to the 2020s. Although, then again, I was a shy little kid who never talked to anyone and despised talking about myself above all else, so maybe it was just me.
It just feels like people's online and private lives became indistinguishable after 2020. I remember seeing extremely personal information about strangers on my TikTok For You Page and people pouring their hearts out in Discord chat rooms in extreme detail (to the point where I've seen servers with six vent channels! Why do you need that many??) when the pandemic was in full swing and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better now, even though a lot of social media platforms are known to have scummy privacy policies, age verification issues, what-have-you. So do people just not care or what? 

[Noah_S]

One big thing that has changed is that people reveal their full name online, completely publicly. That wasn't a thing before facebook. Posting photos of yourself publicly was something you were warned not to do. Not to mention posting your exact location. If you connected with someone to the point of wanting to meet IRL, you would share those things privately. I'm old enough that I'm not gonna reveal what my S stands for. I just looked at your profile, and you're too young to remember the time I'm talking about.

As for talking about personal issues online.. that goes further back than giving out your personal info. People who are in an unsupportive environment AFK are gonna be reaching out online instead. But social media is a bad replacement for the small moderated communities. If someone reading is going to do that, I suggest doing it without revealing your personal info and staying away from social media. Including reddit, despite many people there arguing that it's not a social media.

[lakes]

One big thing that has changed is that people reveal their full name online, completely publicly. That wasn't a thing before facebook. Posting photos of yourself publicly was something you were warned not to do. Not to mention posting your exact location. If you connected with someone to the point of wanting to meet IRL, you would share those things privately. I'm old enough that I'm not gonna reveal what my S stands for. I just looked at your profile, and you're too young to remember the time I'm talking about.

I mean, unfortunately, that goes back even further too. I remember when I was young, overhearing some kid give another kid shit for using a food as a stand-in for his last name on Facebook

As for talking about personal issues online.. that goes further back than giving out your personal info. People who are in an unsupportive environment AFK are gonna be reaching out online instead. But social media is a bad replacement for the small moderated communities. If someone reading is going to do that, I suggest doing it without revealing your personal info and staying away from social media. Including reddit, despite many people there arguing that it's not a social media.

I agree with this. I know reddit is supposed to be a place for "forums." But in trying to be the "everything forum for everyone," it ends up being closer to social media like twitter or instagram.

[Melooon]

I generally prefer people being who the are online. Facebook's approach of only having your real self went much too far, it's important to have usernames and the ability to take on other selves when you're online; however going so far as making those selves completely anonymous produces toxic results too.

Its better to have a balance, you should have usernames for the different kinds of personalities you have, but those should also connect back to a true person, and I don't think its necessary to hide that true person. Being your real self offers accountability, and it helps make people behave themselves and consider their actions.

Of course that will depend on your situation too, e.g. if you live in a country that forbids dinosaurs, and you're posting about dinosaurs all the time.. then you might have good reason to hide that; so the balance is different for everyone.

I usually treat the internet like walking down the street; people there can see my face, they can approach and talk to me, they can know my name if they need it. However at the same time, I'm not going to tell my home address to random people on the street 

A username or an online self is a lot like the different ways of dressing and behaving people have in different spaces. In some spaces I might be formal, in other places its better to be more casual, and in other places you might want to look a bit tough. However you're still you in all cases.

[rnottelovesowls]

i only trust giving out personal details to people who get to know me well first, and vice versa. if i'm in an online space, i will only give my real first name and what country/state i live in to my close friends, and leave it at that. no one needs to know my full legal name, address, or heaven forbid, a picture of my face, if the space emphasizes avatars and usernames. and even though big social media has made revealing your full name, address, and face "normal", i will never do it on those platforms for as long as i live. do you think i trust musk and zuck with such info, when i already don't trust them with... anything?

[chilblands]

Wowie this thread brings up good points about Facebook and the metaverse blurring the line between online and in-person identity.

I usually treat the internet like walking down the street; people there can see my face, they can approach and talk to me, they can know my name if they need it. However at the same time, I'm not going to tell my home address to random people on the street 

I completely agree. I feel like some people overshare too much. Perhaps to the detriment of their safety and privacy. It is a false assumption that people who grew up on the web have better web-safety... if anything, it conditions web-users to unsafe web practices like specifying where you live, work or specific school.

A big example is family vloggers who show the internet their child's whole face, their school and personal preferences. A family vlogger (who I will not name) has been sharing their child's life from pregnancy to adolescence, and strangers would approach the child IN PERSON + the child have a fan-page (literally this PSA).

Even adults, especially female influencers get stalked! Two YouTubers who publicly mentioned they have been stalked by "fans" are Anna Akana and bestdressed (Ashley). I had to privately message a woman who posted a cat walking her home because she is literally showing strangers where she lives (I got ignored). Not every moment need to be shared!

My rule of thumb is: Am I okay with 500 people knowing this information about me?

I am not fully anonymous. Even if I am in incognito mode, I would not want to jeopardise my anonymity privacy is a privilege

[Noah_S]

There are so many of those "family influences" that that description could fit countless channels.

I take keeping my personal info private very seriously. I have fled from an abusive situation (and my social worker was shocked when finding out specifics about the situation; and they're famous for not getting shocked because they've "already heard everything") and was stalked after it. The latest known attempt to find me was 7 years after I fled. And there may be later attempts that I don't know about.

I opted out of joining the Euroring because they ask which country you're in. That's not something that I'm willing to disclose publicly.

The Lusitania drawing I posted is different than what I sent to a close friend. I had taken a photo of it by a vase of flowers. But I cropped it before posting it publicly because I wasn't willing to show interior of my living room including which flowers could be found to put in a vase around early May.

People seem to not only have forgotten how to be careful online, but to be careful online

[Dan Q]

One big thing that has changed is that people reveal their full name online, completely publicly. That wasn't a thing before facebook.

If you go back a little further, it certainly was!

The under-exercised pseudonymity of the nineties 'net

Back in the early to mid-nineties the Web felt like a "small" space. Sure, it was bigger than the BBSes we'd been on before that, but... even though you were now connected to the entire world... there weren't actually that many people on it, and the ones you didn't know personally were quite disparate and spread out, so it felt safe. That was, of course, an illusion, but for a while there it seemed perfectly reasonable to expose your identity online!

Even as late as circa 1996-1997 my personal website would, for example, refer to myself and my friends by name... and where I was talking about friends who didn't (yet) have their own websites, the hyperlinked versions of their name would be a link to their personal email address! Can you imagine! Doing such a thing would be completely socially-unacceptable even by 2000, but in the mid-1990s what spam there was (and there wasn't as much as today) was sent mostly to email addresses harvested from newsgroups, not by Web scraping, so spam was less of a concern. And frankly, getting any email from a Web stranger was a relatively pleasant surprise.

Young, naive, and online

But you're certainly right that pseudonymity was treasured, back then. Just as on some pre-Web platforms, it was generally seen as a strength of the social fabric of the Internet that you could be whomever you wanted to be. Invent a new IRC handle and you had a new identity, and nobody could judge you for what you looked like or where you came from: only by what you said and what you did. It seemed to me to be utopian!

Of course, I was young and naive. I believed that given free access to information and the democratisation of publishing - the power for everybody to have a voice in this new medium - that humans would inevitably trend towards a stable harmony. The system would facilitate self-sorting by interest and outlook and people could expose themselves to whichever societal bubbles they liked so long as they respected the rules of the subcultures they visited. This was, I think, a common belief among pioneers of the early interpersonal Web, and you see its effects everywhere: e.g. it used to be universal, and it's still the case for some top-level domains, that registering a domain name puts your full name, address, and phone number into the public record. Nowadays if you run a WHOIS on a domain you'll probably just be told that the personal information is redacted for privacy reasons, but that's a relatively new invention (I've personally been doxxed based on domain name information before they became commonplace).

But as we know now, to such an extent that you're probably already saying "well, duh!", there's a flipside to anonymity, and not everybody can be trusted to be nice even in an communications utopia. You can't block the flamers when they flip identities, trolls will absolutely brigade you under the veil of their own anonymity, and spammers will absolutely vacuum up all exposed personal information with wild abandon. Plus, the Internet is not its own dimension: it's connected to the real world, and as it grew it became inevitable that the intersection of real life and cyberspace would have its consequences.

How an Internet creep in 1999 taught me to be more-careful online

For me, for example, a wake-up call came in 1999. I'd been blogging for a few years and had engaged with several readers who'd emailed me and with whom I'd struck up a correspondence. And then, one night, the illusion that there was some kind of veil between the real world and the online world was truly shattered... when an... "overenthusiastic fan" (who I knew only by handle and email address)... travelled across the country in order to turn up and surprise me at a nightclub that they'd worked out that I would be at, based on my blogging.

This... cyber-stalker, I guess... was creepy and weird, and the whole experience was pretty terrifying, and it made me rapidly pump the brakes on my online identity and exposure. The simple, quiet Web of half a decade earlier had grown larger and had bled into the real world, and in doing so it had exposed me to the unpleasantness beyond.

So I took more care for a decade or two, dropping the use of a full name (I became "Scatman Dan" for a long while) and not talking openly about my specific geographic location nor about any unusual public place I expected to be in advance any longer.

Ugh; "real name" policies suck ass

Ironically, when "real name" policies began to come into force at places like Facebook and Google Plus from the early to mid 2010s, I struggled to meet them because my name is... pretty unusual (I briefly got banned from Facebook in 2011 for using a fake name... which was my real name!)! It's actually easier for me to get away with using a fake name on big social networks than my real name! Lots more about that over here, if you'd like to laugh at various digital (and paper!) systems that have struggled with my name over the decades!

Nowadays I've given up on hiding my identity online... but I probably wouldn't have if I first connected to the Internet a decade later than I did!

Aaaanyway... nowadays I've decided it's too late for me to bolt the stable door. The Wayback Machine has bits of my website from the 1990s anyway, and my name and address are a matter of public record for other reasons, all of which - coupled with my very unique name (for anybody who doesn't know already, my actual full name, as written on my passport and driving license and birth certificate and everything, is: Dan Q) - means that it's pretty pointless for me personally to try to hide who I am in many online contexts. Sure, I could easily create a new primary pseudonymous identity, but I'd still want some of my existing history to come with me, and that's impossible without making a link between the old and the new. I can - and do - still have secondary pseudonymous identities online... but basically: if you see a Dan Q online, it's probably me (or one of a handful of people called e.g. Dan Quigley or Dan Quincey who insist on stealing the good username first!), and if you put the effort in you can absolutely work out my home address, my date of birth, and probably even my phone number. (Please don't, though: it's creepy. If you want to talk to me, just drop me a DM.)

If I first got online in, say, the mid-naughties instead of the mid-nineties, I'd have definitely been more-anonymous online. But that boat's sailed, for me, and so nowadays I just lean in to my - very definitely "real name", very definitely "me" - identity.

I'm Dan Q. It sounds like an alias, but it's not. And that's fine.

[Noah_S]

Nowadays if you run a WHOIS on a domain you'll probably just be told that the personal information is redacted for privacy reasons, but that's a relatively new invention

Yes, I tried that with my own website. It showed where it's hosted and which language I have the domain panel in. Which doesn't tell anything except that I either speak at least 3 languages or that I'm willing to use a translator.


Needless to say based on what I've written in this thread, I also hate real name policies. I spent some time on quora under a fake name, until I realized that they essentially pay people to spam their website. But I was there when they got rid of the real name policy. And people were livid. Even after having situations like mine pointed out to them, many argued that people should be forced to risk their safety if they wanted to participate.

[b-lly]

(I don't know how pertinent this is but I spent too much time typing it sooo)

I think most people don't care nowdays... a friend of mine wanted to share reddit accounts. reddit! who does that, wasn't anonymnity an unspoken rule of reddit?

I don't like the idea of mixing real life identity with online identity. I don't want online people to know who I am outside of what I share, and vice versa I don't want *everyone* who knows me IRL to be able to find out everything I do online. I always saw the web as a public-private diary, a masquerade ball. but lots of people today see it as an extention of real life and tbh can you blame them, politicians, celebrities, and influencers plaster themselves everywhere, and moving/pictures are the most popular format, joining comes natural. and you can't live without an internet connection!
I also blame facebook for it (the naive period described by Dan didn't last). I did use it when it wasn't boomerville, but it was the outlier for me, the one public square where you shouldn't say things you wouldn't share with your grandma (or your bully)

(unfortunately keeping online and IRL separated isn't easy, I already failed. I've shared a lot online, finding out how old I am and exactly where I live isn't hard. I always shared thinking I'd be an unrecognizable person in a million. but if your friends and relatives start following your instagram art account, and you're incapable of setting boundaries on photos of your face because you don't want to be the paranoid crazy wacko... putting the puzzle together wouldn't be hard)