The Pursuit of Privacy

I've recently been frantically deleting old posts, tweets, photos and details of my name from social networking sites, as well as tightening privacy and security settings. I've tried to get rid of anything that can too easily identify me, my interests, or my friends. I have a vague idea that this has been done for reasons of privacy. But, overall, this is a pointless and bad idea for a number of reasons.

Firstly, no one cares about my details. I'm not rich, famous, or successful. If I were planning a career in politics or the like, I could understand why I've done this, but I'm not, so I don't.

Secondly, even if someone did genuinely seek to undermine me or use my past words against me, my precautions would be ineffectual. Basically, I'm not so good at IT that I could truly protect myself from such threats online if they existed.

Thirdly, I've basically committed cultural genocide against myself:

Twitter's probably the most painful example. I've deleted tweets which might be viewed as too inflammatory or foul-mouthed alongside those which might compromise my security. I've gone from about 1,600 tweets to 200, and now they mostly consist of short one-sentence answers to other people's tweets. I'm too vain to let my tweet-count slip to zero, but I'm too paranoid to allow anything interesting to remain.
edit: Fuck it, I'll delete them all, barring the first one, which will show when I joined, and a second explanatory one, explaining the lack of future posts. I'm nothing if not methodical.

On Facebook, I've deleted all old photo albums, even those which appear benign. I'm not sure why; although my friends could access them, my outside privacy settings were secure. Maybe I just don't trust my friends, but then, of course, they'll have other photos of me anyway, and won't always have the same stringent privacy settings that I employ. This goes back to my second reason listed above. Anyway, beyond photos, I've also started going back over all my old statuses and postings, and deleting them, bit by bit. Again, secondary reason, this is pointless because a lot of my filthy incendiary comments are probably on other people's walls, not to mention what I may've said in countless "private message" conversations (which I can only delete from my side).

Anyway, this talk of wall postings, tweets and status updates lead me onto expanding the third reason. I generally put a lot of effort into my updates and tweets. I sometimes looked back on them and smiled, thinking how enormously clever I was. As each was accompanied by a date and a time, they acted as handy reminders of how I might've felt at a certain time, during a certain period of my life. At the very least, they would've been a good archive of some of my more interesting thoughts and ideas.

Maybe I'm actually being vain in thinking this matters at all. Surely the only reason I'd ever truly look back is because I was writing my autobiography, having achieved a great deal in public life? Am I planning to attain a great and notable standing at some point in my life? Not really. So why should it matter if I'm deleting my past?

Perhaps I feel blasé about this whole trauma because I've been reading a lot about Mark Twain recently, who had a healthy disregard for truth and accurate memory ("Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it" etc.). If I ever rise to prominence, I'll take the opportunity to rewrite my life and reinvigorate the past. Who'll contradict me? Mark Zuckerberg? HA! Show me the evidence.


P.S. All this has made me realise the hypocrisy of this public blog. However, barring a few privacy lapses, it's not too personally compromising. It shall remain. But it'll have to get more interesting to soak up the wisdom and wit from the deleted social-networking posts (Ha. Prove they weren't!).

The Inherent Dangers of Social Networking

I've now signed up to twitter. It's like FaceBook's status updates, but more limited. Also, you can find out what famous people have been eating for dinner and laugh at their little in-jokes without really understanding them. It's the second time I've tried twitter, and I'm going to try and stick with it this time. I don't know why. I think it's a form of masochism. Soon I'll be strapped in to more social-networking sites than I can fit across the links section of Google Chrome. I've already got email accounts, network sites, forums and blogs up there, alongside all my news and information sites. I'm going to eventually run out of time in the day to check all these different ventures, and I'll end up not having time for a real job because I'll be too busy trying voyeuristically tracking Stephen Fry's every move. And then there's always the inherent risk that one of those crazy survivalist USA films about the government's unlimited power will turn out to be real, and I'll be cursing the day that I got myself addicted to twitter as the government surround my house and we have an exciting high-octane shoot-out.

I drew a picture to illustrate what this could look like:

Writing things down - as in, using a pen and paper - now has the feel of a bizarre form of resistance. I realise that I should be ashamed of my adherence to such an archaic system of transcribing my thoughts. And, the downside of this ancient system is that rather than everyone instantly finding out how I feel, they'll have to wait 'til I'm dead and my thoughts are published posthumously. And that'll only happen if I get famous somehow and people actually give a crap, which, let's face it, is not the most likely course of my life. So it's really a complete waste. Unlike social-networking. Which is the best use of anyone's time, always.

Pointless Internet Arguments

The removal of  "For each member who joins, we will donate $0.50 to Haiti earthquake victims".

Today, I won the most pathetic, worthless victory imaginable, barring [sports analogy]. I oversaw the removal of a group purporting to donate money to Haiti earthquake victims, which was, of course, a stupid hoaxing spam group set up by a teenager from Singapore with too much time on his hands.

It started with a message explaining how 50 businesses had agreed to donate 50 cents for every member who joined the group, encouraging members to invite all their friends, etc. It's an old formula. Obviously there was no mention of who these companies were, or when the end date for the donation would be, or whether people's leaving would result in money being taken away from Haitians, and the whole thing was so transparently fake that it was almost laughable.

Except, for some reason, almost 300,000 people had joined, presumably (excepting the minority of angry misanthropes like me) because they believed they were helping in some small way. Their ignorance was breathtaking. Unsurprisingly, I was called "sick", "cynical" and "disgusting", and many other somewhat less-eloquent words, simply because I thought that exploiting human sympathy at a time of genuine suffering was despicable.

Thanks to people pointing this out, the founder (that is, the power-crazed nerd exciting himself over the thought of getting friends to spam each other) decided to remove all forms of interaction in the group, annoying even some of the most diehard (stupid) members, but not before a tremendously underwhelming showdown where I got to tell him just how pathetic and worthless he was. I, and many others, I hope, had also reported the group repeatedly for its spam-tastic content.

A few hours later, the group had disappeared. I'm taking partial credit for this. My god, my life is so completely pathetic, that I actually feel a bit disgusted with myself for how I've wasted today.

Godwin's Law

A good example of Godwin's Law came up today in a FaceBook group which opposed the proposed installation of Rod Liddle as editor of the Independent:

Liddle in the running for the Indie editor? Whatever next? Thank god for the web. Do we really need newspapers and TV "news" these days? The Sutton Trust did a survey of the educational background of leading Brit media journalists a couple of years ago. Over 50% attended private schools. You know, the ones that Hitler so admired. [http://www.suttontrust.com/reports/Journalists-backgrounds-final-report.pdf]. The BBC refused to co-operate with the survey. Can't think why. When I subsequently sent an FOI request to the BBC for this info they fobbed me off with some lame excuses for not providing it. So it seems that British media is the old boys'/girls' eye view of the world. No prizes for guessing which posiitons in the hierarchies of the media they occupy. 

Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

It made me smile, and I got to publicise my AMAZINGLY-APT FaceBook group:
The link to which I've removed as part of my bizarre privacy drive (26th July 2011).

which is titled removed I did thoroughly enjoy this man's (boy's?) post though, as it combined a reasonable level of verbal sophistication with naked anti-snobbery and poor logic. I might make him a literary caricature! Incidentally, this would be the highest honour ever bestowed on anybody. And that's including receiving the Oscar for Best Picture. I rate myself highly.