Tech and life

So you’ve uploaded all your photos to a social network and they’ve been tagged. Your profile picture is on Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ and your picture avatar follows you everywhere online from forums to blog comments. That’s okay isn’t it? There’s nothing to worry about, everyone else is doing it so it must be fine… I’d rather this than a cartoon or clip art for my avatar.

And it may well be okay, but there have been recent developments which may just start the alarm bells ringing. But first, can I take you back to a time before Facebook and social networking. In the early days online it was fine to have a cool username and cartoon avatar as part of your online persona. I came across this post on identity management in cyberspace (written in 2002 – pre-social networking) which brought that home nicely. It wasn’t necessary to bring your real personal identity online in those days. In fact there are even a bunch of terms used to describe your online persona: handle, alias, nickname, moniker, alter ego. But with the rise and rise of Facebook, Twitter  and now Google+, they want real names, with profile pictures encouraging real identity aggregated between online services. It seems now it’s time to be real online – real names and real tagged photos to identify us. But as I’ve said before on several occasions, we’re still breaking new ground with online social networking. We’re only about 5 years into this fledgling phenomenon. It’s not been done before and it remains to be seen whether being so open with our real names and photos will have a scary downside in say 10 to 15 years time when so much information has been released by us and gathered by… who knows who? So I’ve always been a little reluctant to put too much personal information out there. But not so for my business – online directories with real names and business details is surely okay. But hear me out, particularly on online photos of yourself.

Facial recognition

It’s not very hard to imagine that in the next few years our mobile devices will feature facial recognition technology – software to put names to faces in photos. Trial facial recognition software, PittPatt,  developed at Carnegie Mellon University can take a photo of a stranger and, using information from the cloud (Facebook, etc), can track down their real identity in minutes. It’s only a short hop from there to search and dig out other information like address, email and mobile phone numbers linked to the photo and identity and we surely have the scary possibility of some stranger snapping you with their mobile phone and fairly quickly getting hold of a lot of useful personal information about you.

Pseudonymity

But then I could be totally wrong, and judging by the millions  of people quite happy to put so much information online, I probably am. But at least spare a thought for those of us who continue to operate under pseudonyms and don’t want to put up photos of ourselves. It’s not because we want to hide behind a front and dish out stuff without fear of recrimination. There may just be a good reason now for trying to preserve our anonymity.

Have you every googled your name and been surprised at how much detail comes up? Even though some of it is out of date and quite misleading, it’s all virtually impossible to remove once it’s out there. But people are making judgements of you based on what they find. You could also try googling your phone number + city/town and see if that brings up other aspects of your identity for all to see.

You don’t have to go the real name route online. After a lot of pressure, Google has finally backtracked on the real name requirement for Google+ and soon you will be able to sign up under a pseudonym. So perhaps it’s time to think again about online photos and online identity before it’s too late. Or am I just being way too paranoid? Drop a comment below.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post on online identity and privacy giving some reasons for using an alias on this blog. I registered the domain under a proxy to preserve my anonymity and have since continued to be techandlife here. As far as I’m aware, no-one reading this blog (except for close family, and Google of course) knows my real identity. So in terms of blogging, it seems you can still preserve your anonymity online, if that’s what you want.

But things have moved on quite a lot in 2 years. With the explosion of ‘social’, seen particularly in the growth of Twitter and Facebook and now it seems Google+, it’s now pretty clear that you can’t be social and hide behind an alias. To be social you have to give a real photo of yourself and a real name, and judging by the popularity of Facebook for example, most people don’t seem to have a problem with that. In fact, it’s very clear that I’m really very much in the minority holding back on revealing my identity.

I would still argue that ‘online social’ is still in its infancy. We just don’t really know what the long term effects of our online presence will be. But there’s no question it’s hard to fight against it. Apart from Twitter and Facebook, here are a further three areas where anonymity is being shoved aside.

Quora

Quora is a pretty recent and very popular questions and answers site. I tried signing up under an alias but they would have none of it. I was blocked because the name associated with my account did not conform to Quora’s naming policy. Real names please.

Facebook photo tagging

Yes I know, if you’re registered with Facebook (under your real name), you can remove your name tag from photos where you’ve been tagged, if you want. But did you know that your photos can still be tagged even if you aren’t on Facebook. I know because it’s happened to me. Yes, I know the tag won’t link back to your page, because you don’t have one, but still anyone on Facebook can insert your name in any photo there. So how many people have been tagged in Facebook without even realising it – because they’re not on Facebook. And you can only remove the tags by signing up, then removing them.

Google+

To register for Google+, the latest social network, you have to have a Google profile, and that can’t be private any more. You have to reveal at least your name and gender.

So all roads seem to be  pointing to zero anonymity now if you want to go fully ‘social’. And that seems to be right – social and anonymous just don’t fit together. People want to talk to real people. So that’s it. I’m going to embrace ‘social’ and start putting up my real name when required. What changed my mind? Well, just the seeming futility of continually pushing against it when everyone else seems happy with it… and also the arrival of Google+. I think I have to be there. Looks like it’s going to be a serious rival for Facebook and that’s got to be a good thing. We just have to blindly trust Google with our personal information and that’s okay… isn’t it?

But I’ll go cautiously. I think I know enough about online to be careful what I say and what I reveal.

Any thoughts on anonymity and social?

‘Once it’s online, it stays in the public eye forever’, or so the saying goes. Not sure if this generalization is strictly accurate but in any case, for some that’s absolutely no problem: ‘I’ve got nothing to hide; I’ll just hang everything out there and it’ll be fine’. What’s all the fuss about?’ They’re quite happy to share all this and more on social networks like Facebook, even right down to the software they use through sites like Wakoopa.

Others are slightly more cautious online going under an alias and trying to keep their personal identity private to the best of their ability. Which is the right approach? I guess both really…it just depends what you are happy with.

I agonized over revealing my identity before I registered this domain and started blogging. I knew I wanted a consistent and unique brand identity recognizable across blogs, comments, forums and social networks, but should I use my real name? And on social networks many, many people use a photo of themselves along with their real name. Can this be okay? Yes giving your real name and photo gives an air of honesty – some people are quite happy to have their online content associated closely with their personal identity. On the other hand, there’s a suspicion that if a person hides behind an alias and an avatar which isn’t their real photo, these people will be more likely to be a nuisance on forums and in blog comments as their true identity is hidden. This may very well be the case. And I know from reading blog posts that some people won’t follow a person on Twitter if they don’t show their photo as their avatar. Fair enough. But really, all you have to do is check their profile to see what sort of fingerprint they are leaving and decide on that basis.

My real name is pretty unique and this had a bearing on my decision. A search on Google using my real name has me in third place on the first page with quite a few further occurrences on that page mostly related to my self-employed business. At the end of the day, I just wasn’t happy adding to all the info already out by using my real full identity and photograph on my blog. When you think about it, blogging and social networking are really still very much in their infancy. We’re just starting out and who knows for certain what consequences putting all this info up for everyone to see will have over the long term. Hopefully it will all be okay…but will we all live to regret it and will it all come home to haunt us?

Already it’s possible to search your name or alias using a site like keyboardr and at lightning speed, gather up masses of information from your online footprint.

So, for the time being at least, let’s just say I’m Colin from Scotland, but my handle is techandlife online. I’m happy with that and I hope that’s okay with everyone. But I’d love to hear your comments, both for and against.

Photo credit: luc legay

Further reading: Web Worker Daily: Maintaining Privacy as an Online Freelancer

Added 28th January 2009: What the web knows about you

Added 29th January 2009: The Privacy Dilemma

Added 4th August 2009: Internet Privacy – You’re Kidding, Right?