silver

I'll get about two sentences (that is - if I'm actually sitting at my computer, and not either gallivanting outside probably playing ingress, or lying in bed reading something stupid on my phone again). But one of the thoughts that keeps intruding is my increasing uneasiness at posting so much online - even privately. I actually use lj/dw - lj especially - as a combo public journal and private one. I still post a fair percentage as public/flocked, but a lot of journalling became online. Trying to write as much as I usually do gives my hand cramps because I feel that archivist urge so much. It's fun to look back at what I was thinking and seeing!

But I worry about what I'm putting online. I'm pseudonymous, of course, and if it were to all become public it's only minorly embarrassing, and it's minorly embarrassing only because I like privacy. It's mostly just information that's not really relevant to anyone, I went here, I went there, oh digression digression digression, it's not a burn book or much detail. There are linkages to my wallet name, of course. But even that doesn't worry me that much. Instead, I'm increasingly unhappy with the way that companies harvest my data online and use it to sell things to me. Yes - sell things to me. It's not particularly sinister, yet, but I resent that data science (which I am myself interested in....) is being used to make these predictions. And if my activity on various sites like instagram and youtube and google are useful, how much more fruitful is my own writing in my voice about what I see and like and want and go out and do? Ten years ago natural language processing wasn't really something to be used commercially. Now it is.

But the way social media works, with services free and providers looking for a way to monetize - I don't think there's a way to avoid this problem. And I like social media. I produce content on pretty much all the platforms I'm on; I'll comment, write, contribute photos, etc, because I like engaging. But looking through the archives that Google can pull about the stuff they've compiled about me is unsettling.

I see this all the time in Support requests.

Please, if you have information that you think is sensitive, do not share it publicly on the internet. On LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, you have the option to flock or to make the entry private. Flock isn't perfect, but at least third-party search engines can't index it - they don't know it exists, period.

Do not put private, sensitive, or embarrassing information about yourself online, connected to your real name, unless you are fine with everyone around you knowing. There are people who, in high school, put all sorts of information out, and now are scrambling to delete it so that potential employers don't find it. Write it down offline. Privatize. Flock. Lock to custom friends groups.

Please do take precautions. In most cases as there are no TOS violations, LiveJournal support can't do a thing to delete your embarrassing entries if you forget your password/username. Most search engines won't delete the cache unless you delete it first from LiveJournal. There is nothing we can do.

I'm off to England (OK, fine, it's actually Great Britain; I don't think we're going to Ireland/Northern Ireland) and France. And I shall go back to paper-and-pen journaling and not look at communities. I think.

I'll catch up on f-lists and things (avalanches of comments on long-ago posts may occur) when I get back in mid-August. If there's suddenly a big emergency (and why this would occur I have truly no idea) but if it does happen and you need to contact me, try PM-ing me. Have a lovely summer.