Jaguar
My life online has grown in the past year or so. Writing a blog, twittering, using delicious, and socializing on facebook are now a regular part of my day-to-day life. O.K., not so much the writing-a-blog thing, but I do read quite a few blogs- does that count? Regardless, safety and identity theft are never far from my mind.
Tonight my wife and I were having a discussion about youtube. I told her that I started an account on youtube in hopes of making and uploading a few videos from our upcoming family vacation. I would also post to a flickr account so that our family and friends could access the pictures. Her reaction was, safe to say, a resounding negative one. She didn’t want any image of herself or our daughter online for all to see. She has a different perspective of safety because of her job as a social worker. I, on the other hand, want to use these new technologies both in my classroom and for my personal life. Where’s the balance?
So make a long story into a question: how do you balance the use of sites like flickr, youtube, facebook, etc. with personal online safety? How do you handle the need for safety with the desire to share with others?
2 responses so far ↓
Damian Bariexca // 2008/07/31 at 9:36 pm |
Most services have privacy settings that allow for only “invited users” to see your info. Picasa, where we keep our online family photo album, is one such example; Facebook allows you to set different levels of access for different friends (e.g., everyone in your network can see your profile, but only friends can see your cell phone number).
If my wife was objecting, I’d ask her to list her concerns very specifically so we could talk through them and determine how rational or irrational they might be. My wife doesn’t want a Facebook account, but has no problem with me having one, or putting pics of our family in a publicly viewable Picasa album. Frankly, of all the Picasa albums online, who’s going to be looking for ours? And if they do, just what are they going to do with the pictures – put them on dartboards?
God forbid, but if something’s going to happen to my kids, it’s far more likely to be at the hands of someone they know than some random kook on the Internet.
We have to be smart about the information we post online, and every individual’s going to have different comfort levels about what’s OK to post. That’s fine, but I think it also pays to have some open dialogue about exactly what risks we’re running and what risks we’re imagining – not a hard thing to do when we’re bombarded with alarmist portrayals of the Internet. See if you and your wife can come to some sort of compromise about what goes online in a public space like Flickr and what goes on maybe a private wiki or blog that only family members have access to; depending on her clientele as a social worker, I guess in a way I can see where she’s coming from with her concerns.
Paul // 2008/07/31 at 11:41 pm |
Thanks for responding, Damian. I appreciate the candor. My wife works with victims of domestic violence. That includes sexual assault victims. It’s a seedy and disgustingly disturbing world out there, so she views the internet with much more caution than I do. She’s hearing the law enforcement side of the issue.I want to teach safety to my students and daughter and wife, but I guess, if I was paranoid, nothing’s really safe online.
I’m not an alarmist. I, too, see the alarmists’ reports about the internet and wonder at people’s inability to discern reality from a banker in Nigeria. But where can we draw the line?