Being Smarter With Your Online Identity

As Travis alluded to in his post, smart phones will predominantly be the phone used as one of the four still relevant gadgets. But a bigger implication is in how much more we will be connected to the internet as a society. We use the internet as a means to stay in touch with the rest of the world, our jobs, friends and family, and even tasks like banking and purchases. In doing so we start to share more and more until our life stories end up online. Ultimately, our information becomes available for any one to view.

Most everyone can remember their mom warning us about making a good first impression, but where are the 21st century mothers telling us to also watch after our online presence too. Why is this important? Well, people who will make decisions about the type of character I am will read this blog knowing full well I participate in it (aka my background investigator) and make a judgement on me based on what is said. But other than the qualitative information my presence may yield, there is also the quantitative data such as where I live or how I can be reached on my cellular phone. This is information that has, at least for me, an inverse proportion over how much I want to share vs how many people I would like to share it with.

Now while all this sharing is going on, Google called light to something else: openness. They believed that for the internet to really thrive in its best form, information needs to easily be accessible to anyone [who should have access to it]. And to do that, better controls need to be put into place so that the user can see their presence and make appropriate decisions about what is shared and what isn't. In the case of what Google knows about you, the easiest thing you can do is to simply Google Yourself. Immediately, you will be able to see almost every part of where your online presence has been. Taking this a step further, most people have a Google account which allows you to use one of several services they offer (Mail, Blogger, Contacts, Docs, etc). In all, I have about 17 services my primary user account is linked to. Google wanted to take its own advice with openness and created an entire section where I can view everything Google knows about me from using their services. I can view it from their Dashboard, where I also have complete control to manage the content all from that one page.

Another website a lot of people use is Facebook. This is a perfect example of a way to better manage your content as Facebook recently updated their privacy settings to allow you to more accurately specify who can view your information and to what extent. I've created a simple / dynamic solution that groups people by how much I would like them to see. In my case, only three groups were created. The first group is just my overall friends on the site, the second is a select group of my closest friends (this group being the one that I want them to see everything about my profile) and the last being a group with only very limited access to see my profile. To separate them, I've created two lists and sorted friends into them: "myFacebook" and "Limited View" with my regular friends being left out of the list and in their regular "Friends" grouping as they are already technically grouped. Then on the Privacy Page, I set things like my phone number and current address to viewable only to the "myFacebook" list where as things like the about me section to everyone. Then there are things such as my wall where I want any of my friends to see, but maybe not the older relatives of whom I've added into my "Limited View" list. For that, I set the wall visible to Only Friends *Except* "Limited View". Now as I add new friends, Facebook asks me which list(s) I want my new friend to be in and I can add them into the appropriate group of people right then and there which automatically applies all privacy settings to them.

My last reminder is to set your profile(s) to private. If you aren't my friend, I don't want you to see anything on there. The same holds true for my Twitter accounts. Sometimes I'll add location data to a comment / post I make. I wouldn't be too comfortable with the fact if some random person I had never met just shows up where I am. I have even gone to the extent of disallowing someone not in my region to be able to search for me on Facebook simply for the fact that if I meet someone and I want to friend them on there, I'll go through another arrangement to do so.

There are a couple other tricks to do with lists and later on down the road, I'll probably share them here as a way to help you better your Facebook experience. Either way, I hope this post not only helps, but preserves your enjoyment with your online presence all while keeping you safe.