Blogging and Privacy

Introduction: A Blogging Age Without Privacy?

Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public’s imagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one’s life and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends’ feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent.

Fernanda Viégas’ blog survey

In an online survey conducted by Fernanda Viégas (2004) between January 14th and January 21st, 2004, 55% of bloggers identify themselves on their sites; 76% of bloggers do not limit access (i.e. readership) to their entries in any way. “When blogging about people they know personally, 66% of respondents almost never asked permission to do so; whereas, only 9% said they never blogged about people they knew personally”, and 36% of respondents have gotten in trouble because of things they have written on their blogs.

As we can see from the statistic above, we can easily know that - if you blog, there are no guarantees you'll attract a readership of thousands, but at least a few readers will find your blog, and they may be the people you'd least want or expect. These include potential or current employers, coworkers, and professional colleagues; your neighbors; your spouse or partner; your family; and anyone else curious enough to type your name, email address or screen name into Google or Feedster and click a few links.

So, how could we blog safely in this age of blogging?

Blogging Anonymously?

According to Electronic Frontier Foundation (2005), “The best way to blog and still preserve some privacy is to do it anonymously”. EFF offered a few simple precautions to help us maintain control of our personal privacy:

·Use a Pseudonym and Don't Give Away Any Identifying Details - include things like where you're located, how many employees there are, and the specific sort of business you do.
·Use Anonymizing Technologies-e.g.Invisiblog.com is a service that offers anonymous blog hosting for free; Anonymizer.com offers a product called "Anonymous Surfing," which routes your Internet traffic through an anonymizing server and can hide your IP address from the services hosting your blog.
·Use Ping Servers - If you want to protect your privacy while getting news out quickly, try using ping servers to broadcast your blog entry for you.
·Limit Your Audience - designate individual posts or your entire blog as available only to those who have the password, or to people whom you've designated as friends.
·Don't Be Googleable- create a special file (robots.txt, or a Robots Text File) that tells these search services to ignore your domain.
·Register Your Domain Name Anonymously

Being Anonymous is impossible?

“The best way to blog is to do it anonymously”. But on the other side, being anonymous isn't as easy as you might think. John M. Grohol(2005) gave us different opinions:

·“What You Write Stays Around Forever”
If you're writing in a public blog, once that writing is indexed by search engines (which happens automatically and continuously), your entry may be cached forever. While you may take measures to try and undo the damage later on, your task will be far greater at that time (and may be impossible). While many people are aware of the large search engines that cache online documents, such as the Internet Archive and Google, few know there are dozens of other services that are less well-known that also store cached documents. Getting these copies removed a decade from now will take a lot of legwork, emails, and frustrating phone calls.

·“Pseudonyms Don't Mean You're Anonymous”
Many people believe they are protecting themselves online by using a pseudonym, a made-up name that they use as their online identity. The problem with this belief is that all too often, people use the same pseudonym for many different places they travel online. If you don't use different pseudonyms for different situations or purposes online, you're likely to make your identity fairly easy to discover.

·“Identifying Information While Blogging”
Even if you play it safe and use a pseudonym you haven't used anywhere else online, you need to be cognizant of the details you give of your life. Details about where you live, what you do in your free time, where you hang out, all of that information makes it relatively easy for someone researching a real person to connect it to the online identity. Meanwhile, how can you guarantee that anyone else writing about you has also given you a unique pseudonym?

Conclusion：It is your choice

In the late 1990's, the head of a large Internet computer company made the statement, “Privacy is dead, get over it.” There's some truth to that statement, that in order to ensure one's privacy, one should never make a single public utterance or statement. For absolute privacy, say nothing online. However, that is not a realistic strategy in this day and age. The Internet is the great communicator vehicle, and it will not be silenced simply because of privacy issues. Instead, all one has to do is to think about these issues now, before you leaving a serious imprint online. Even if you've already started, it's not too late to create new, separate identities, erase as much vestiges of the old ones, and be more careful in the future.

Privacy is as much a state of mind as it a set of techniques or actions you can take. If you begin to think of your life as a private entity, one where you're willing to let certain people share certain parts of it, you'll gain a greater confidence in how to share online. Blogging is supposed to be fun and interesting. You don't have to be a naked, open book to take part in the fun and excitement of blogging. But if you do choose that route, just be aware the long-term consequences of your decision and the potential issues it may raise for you in the future. You have many choices available to you, so take a few minutes to choose wisely.