How We Give Away Our Personal Information and Blend Social Circles
Let's assume the simple situation: we share the photo on Facebook, or we send it to our friends, and this picture becomes the threat to our anonymity. If it contains the information what we don't want to be public, once it gets to the internet, we have no guarantee that we will be able to control the spreading of the particular file or information.
There are a lot of web archives, peer to peer networks and other data storing places, such as blockchain. Once something is on the internet, we should always assume that this information will be public.
It seems like we love giving out our anonymity for free. A lot of people share the details of their personal life or nearly every activity they do like it's happening on Snapchat. But on the Facebook we've got added friends from our workplace, family, school, business contacts and people from other communities. While we share our privacy to all these people, we often don't consider what if our business partner sees our party picture. A lot of drama started because of the information shared on our wall. Some people lost their jobs. Some couples broke up. Sometimes different circles revealed in the comments the inadequate information to the and in this way allowed to read it in for people in the second circle.
Facebook when it was created assumed that we've got one circle of friends - it was the application for college students. As its popularity grows, it made some changes like grouped people to the close friends, family and in this way have higher control of who gets our posts. The feature is good on the paper, but as we look at it, we can come to the conclusion that no one does it. It's a too big hassle, especially because our private life isn't black or white. Our coworkers are sometimes our good friends, some we'd like to see nothing on our profile because we don't like them. Keeping it updated with around 150 friends isn't fun. By the way, Robin Dunbar said that the number of people we can know is around 150 and his theory is very accurate as it's the average number of friends people have on Facebook.
It would be reasonable to put more thought on what we publish and what are consequences of it. Do you want to become a worldwide recognized meme because of some video you put on social media "just for your friends"?
There ARE solutions to this using psychological "tricks" like Nudges (The article goes in depth on not just what nudges are, but also why they are certainly NOT a miracle solution) to make pople think twice before hitting "publish".
One idea, that I just thought up, would be having an automatic "cancel" period where the user who has posted something at in between 11 PM and 5 AM gets a notice the post won't go up till 7 AM, if they confirm it at that time, and giving them an option to bypass it (maybe putting a subtle picture of your boss and colleagues in the background to remind you just who can see it).
Of course, the best strategy would be for people to do exactly what you are suggesting. Wisen up on what to post and to whom, and which details of our lives to keep off the Internet.
Personally, I'd never post something "just" for my friends online, because I know the internet and also have the healthy belief that my computer's more likely to be infected with a RAT program (enabling people to spy on all I do and/or copy any files and distribute them everywhere) than not.
Thanks for bringing up the concept of Nudges, I didn't hear about it earlier.
Automatic cancel would solve the problem, but I think you forgot why people publish things on the internet - I suspect it's mainly for the instant domapine rush we get from expressing ourselves, especially in some attention-grabbing situations, so for these people it would make no sense to put out their favorite drug for later.
This post was motivated mainly by the failed attempts to get the information from my peers about why they post everything they do on social media, especially some extremely dumb things like drawing a dick on the desk. They don't know why.
I think it's that they were doing it for so long that they don't know how we can't do it. It became the part of their identity.
We can't assume that everyone is willing to think about what they are publishing before doing it. It's good for you that you do.
Hmmm... That's a VERY interesting notion.
I think I've read about something similar, about how doing something all our lives just makes it part of us, so much that we don't realize others would find it strange.
I'm fascinated with psychology, mainly because in my youth I had a lot of difficulties understanding how others behaved, and how to behave in turn.
I'll make more posts connected to the human psychology. I'm just starting :)
I also had some difficulties with other people, I'm extremely introvert and realizing the nastiness of the human psyche was a turning point in my life. There's a lot more concepts to explore.
True. My turning point was realizing how little I knew about how I made decisions, and how little others knew about why they made THEIR decisions XS.
Otherwise I spend all my time as a kid with my nose in a book. (Still do. Goodreads counts 14 books just from the start of 2017 :) )
I'll be looking forward to your posts !
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