Being Two-Faced (or even more) on the Internet

The Virtue of the Walled Garden

This post isn’t about deceit, it’s about creating walled gardens of individuality.

In the social internet, you are encouraged to be you, your name, yourself. But it might benefit us to be more cautious and adopt a feeling of being two-faced. Not to lie to your friends about who you are, but more to make sure to segregate your friends from your acquaintances.

Here’s my concern, see if you don’t share it with me: privacy on the internet is becoming more and more scarce as time moves forward. Every day we hear a new security-related incident that could have implications for identity theft. There’s a break-in to Sony’s Playstation Network that steals the personal data of thousands of users of the service. There’s a young lady who posts less than enthusiastic comments about her filing job’s duties on her Facebook page and is fired for it,  making her one of several people to be fired for Facebook indiscretions. Job applicants’ names are regularly run through online search engines to see if there are any publicly facing pages that might disqualify them for the position.

New York Times Magazine reports on how privacy and starting over by putting mistakes and perceived mis-judgements may well be a thing of the past. A United States Representative, Anthony Weiner mistyped an “@” instead of a “d ” in a Twitter message and exposed a great deal of salacious private activity that eventually pushed him to resign from the House. Even former CEO of Google is reported as having suggested that there may come a day when people turning 18 may just get a new name and a new identity so that they wouldn’t be hampered by youthful indiscretions, because Google won’t forget that stuff.

I’m suggesting that it’s time to consider creating multiple personae to obfuscate our various personal identities. It’s been good enough for authors to have pseudonyms and pen names for hundreds of years. Now that we are all, to a certain extent publicly facing autobiographical authors, perhaps it’s time to do some work to manage our brand.

As a computer professional, I’m well aware that obfuscation isn’t security. But I feel that the technique that I’m outlining might offer a greater level of brand control, and for most of us, that’s what will make our personal and professional lives much more comfortable. Besides, if you know enough to call me on the “obfuscation isn’t security” line, chances are you’re already using some of these techniques to a certain extent anyway.

How Does It Work?

Here’s what I’m proposing:

1. Pick yourself a new nickname that you feel adequately represents you as a whole person. Try something that is unique and doesn’t necessarily have a lot of connotative baggage to it: Ferdelen, or Jakdaal, or Hebraid’n. Make it fun and fairly short.
2. Find yourself a free email service that you think looks and feels nice, and with a company that you trust. That can be something like Google’s Gmail, or Microsoft’s Hotmail, or Aol’s err… AOL Mail. If you don’t like those folks, check out the Wikipedia list of email providers and see if you can find one that better strikes your fancy.
3. Set up an account using your new persona name on a social media site. I’ve found that Twitter is easiest, and that service has a number of clients that will allow you quickly and easily change between multiple accounts. However, Facebook even has instructions on how to log into multiple Facebook accounts. How handy is that?
4. Once you’ve got a new account for your new persona (and I really recommend only doing one at a time), make sure one of your first stops is to the Security settings. While there, make sure to make your profile and everything that you communicate through it Private so that no one might see your output there unless you have either befriended them or you’ve approved their seeing things or something of the like.
5. Privacy settings set as tight as possible? Awesome! Now make sure to invite the people who you really care about. Invite only the people you can trust to keep in confidence the things that you are sharing through that persona.
6. Go to town with your new persona!

Now I know that this isn’t foolproof. It’s amazingly susceptible to you getting confused and making mistakes when posting one persona to the other (though to my mind much less than if you only had the one account/persona).

Plus, what’s on the internet is on the internet and is probably available to be searched. Given data mining techniques, all another persona will really do to the determined researcher is add a layer of difficulty, so it wouldn’t really have saved Rep Weiner from the consequences of his self-destructive behavior, it just would have made it more difficult to find it out.

But, having an extra persona (or several!) allows you to have levels of personality exploration that won’t immediately be traceable to your public-facing personality. Cumbersome? Absolutely. Will this be great for everyone? Nope, hiding things about who you are may feel like lying to some people, and that level of complexity might add a level of difficulty that reduces the value of the internet and social networking for others.

Still, this technique is worth considering, if only to understand that your children could set up similar systems of keeping some of their activities walled off from your knowledge, and as Schoolhouse Rock says, “It’s great to learn, ’cause knowledge is power!“.

Did I miss something? Is there a technique that you like to use to create a “walled garden” for your private social sharing? Let us all benefit from your experience in the comments!

White flowers in a walled garden used with Creative Commons permission by Flickr user strife.