Handling your identity across many online profiles | Social Signal

According to Microsoft Canada, the average Canuck has seven online profiles out there. A lot of us have a lot more - some active, some abandoned and gathering dust, and still others that are forgotten yet still chug automatically along. (I haven't opened my FriendFeed page in well over a month, but it includes things I did only a few minutes ago.)

Vancouver Sun reporter Gillian Shaw takes a look at how we're managing all of those online lenses into our lives, in an article today titled "Cyberhydra" (the source of that Microsoft stat, by the way). She talks to a number of Vancouver social media types, including Jennifer Lowther and Kris Krug, about how closely their readers follow their every movement, and how to handle that attention.

She quotes Kris as saying,

"You could literally reconstitute my life from my digital identity. You would recreate the story of my life from the landmarks I have left out there."

At one level that's dazzlingly cool. But at another, the implications for privacy are pretty bracing. I'm in the article too, talking about how social media encourages us to conduct a kind of open surveillance on ourselves, and how aggregating our online information can lead to a remarkably comprehensive portrait.

I went into more detail on privacy in the aggregation era in a blog post a while back, and at the time I suggested approaches people creating online communities could take to start minimizing the privacy risk to their members.

Now let's look at it from the other direction. Here are five starting points for managing all of that info we're putting out into the digital world... and asserting some control over the picture that emerges:

• Intention, intention, intention. There are lots of ways to more or less automatically update the world on where you are, what you're doing and how you're feeling. Think twice about that approach, and consider instead: what do you want to achieve? Who do you want to reach? Why are you sharing this, and is there a better way to do it?
• Check your settings. Services like Facebook give you surprisingly fine-grained control over how widely your information is shared. Think about what kind of information you want to broadcast to the world, what you want to share only with a few trusted friends, and what falls somewhere in between.
• Think big. Don't just think about your friends who are following your updates; broaden your horizons. A prospective employer, your parents, your kids, your landlord... depending on how you're sharing information, they could all be reading about what you're up to. And if something you do or say goes viral, your audience could be exponentially bigger than you ever thought.
• Think social. Chances are you aren't just sharing information about yourself, but about the people you interact with. Are you respecting their privacy? "Just met with (name) who's thinking about leaving her job" might not go over well with their boss, and a photo of last night's drunken frolicking may cause a friend some major embarassment.
• Think aggregation. This is the hardest skill of all, and it'll take some getting used to. But we all have to start thinking about the information we put into the world as a whole - even if we're putting it in a lot of different places. Google, Technorati and other search and aggregation tools can put those pieces together very quickly and easily.

Does this sound scary? Maybe. But there's a positive side to this, too. It's easier than ever before to stay in touch with each other, and to quickly know the details of each other's lives. When we use that information positively, and with a sense of purpose, it can be a powerful way of strengthening ties of community and friendship.

A little intention and attention - and discretion - can go a long way to making that happen.