Anil Dash on Privacy Through Identity Control

Anil Dash wondered (in 2002) about what changes will come to be as publicy displaces privacy as the social norm:

Well, first, of course, social expectations will change. The fear everyone has is that we’ll all have to be nice all the time. And niceness sucks. It’s the valid part of the backlash against “political correctness”. Except that most of the people who object to political correctness do so because they resent that they’ve lost the chance to be coarse and offensive in public. They’re resenting the loss of social control that they used to have, when calling a person or a group by an offensive name was acceptable because there wasn’t any social or political cost to doing so.

But if we’re not going to become nice while all our words are for the record, what will we do? Well, we’ll adapt and become more reasonable in our expectations of people in the public. Instead of expecting that Britney Spears never acknowledge the loss of her virginity, that she might preserve a marketing message, we’ll either accept that she tells the truth, or not require her to discuss it at all. One or two generations from now, the impossibility of scrubbing every private utterance for the demands of permanent public presentation will lead to a society much more accepting of occasional flubs, faults, and flaws. Behold, the triumph of context. Metadata about a person, and hyperlinks to their lifelong record, will inform the decisions made by a public used to an informal, non-governmental version of Total Information Awareness.

So do we have to, as Scott McNealy said, “get over” our desire for privacy. Do we have to permanently filter our thoughts and expressions, lest they be thrown back at us at some inopportune moment in the future? What do we do until people are used to seeking out context, until meta is intrinsic? Well, you have to own your name.

[…]

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.

In a few years, it won’t be as critical. There will be a reasonably trustworthy system of identity and authorship verification. Finding a person’s words and thoughts across different media and time periods will be relatively easy. Getting a “true” picture of that person might be possible, even simple. But that’s years away. For now, recognize that you’re a celebrity, treat your likeness and personal information with that gravity, and choose which statements and facts are going to represent your presence in the global media universe. Any adult in an industrialized society who hasn’t taken these steps is forfeiting opportunity and security, out of either laziness or ignorance. Maintaining privacy in the face of corporations and governments that wish to violate it requires a bit of identity judo, neutralizing their desire for everything by freely giving away just a little bit.

If you own the definitive site about yourself, you have a hope of controlling how you are perceived, but you will be viewed, and reviewed, no matter what you do.