As you might have surmised, I am a blogger. I’m not just a blogger. I’m a vlogger, and a photographer, and a traveller, and a filmmaker, and many other -ers besides. This can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be worrisome. Through my blogging and general out-there-ness, I’ve ended up making portions of my life transparent. If you’re someone like Kevin Rose or Barack Obama, making part of what you do transparent can be a real success strategy, but if you’re someone a little less deliberate, you might find yourself in hot water pretty quickly. As with anything on the internet, there is common sense, and there are risks that supersede common sense. Giving out your home address is not the wisest course of action in life or online, but sometimes you don’t give it out, someone else does, and while there’s a lot of legal precedent for identity theft and privacy invasion in the real world, the rules governing online privacy have a much shorter history.

Before I delve headfirst into my take on online privacy, first I’d like to make a distinction between safety and privacy. These are two different concerns, though they often overlap. Privacy, to me at least, is about the balance between your right to express freely and your right to keep information out of the public eye. While safety is often a violation put upon us by others, the extent of your privacy is often a choice you make. So how do those of us exercising our free speech (transparently in places like the US and often anonymously in places like Iran) practise transparency while still maintaining our privacy, and the privacy required to retain our safety?

PROBLEM 1: In vs. Beyond Our Control

It’s worrisome because I find myself making decisions about what to write, do, or film based on these sorts of questions. A healthy dose of internet paranoia is probably wise, but it’s a shame that there are whole chunks of photographs I’ve taken, for instance, that I’ll never publish on the internet because they either give away too much personal information or could possibly divulge someone else’s. Some things I’d like to keep private, but sometimes the far reaches of google get the better of you. If you create a myspace page and then remove it, does it still exist? If you delete a file on your hard drive, can you get it back? If you send a private email, can you erase that information? Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons and internet entrepreneur with some pretty strong privacy opinions, in an interview with the Japan Times spoke about a series of lists and references, essentially information about you collected and held onto by others that you have no control over. It happens offline too, but it’s so much easier to unearth online, that the thought of blogging personal or professional information, as Ito does, can seem terrifying for some. Ito combats the problem by controlling the information put out there, and he claims that by publishing the information first on his own platform, it’s much harder for it to be misunderstood because it’s framed in the proper context. He controls the information and thus maintains a level of privacy.

Ito’s tactic is an interesting one, and while my own writing can seem very personal, I honestly believe I don’t post anything I wouldn’t tell a stranger at a bus stop. There’s an alarming amount of information about me floating around the ethers already, and any determined hacker or con artist or wrongdoer could find out shedloads of personal information about not just me, but about you too with just a few internet searches and a phone call or two. So it has always been, and just because you don’t have a digital alarm system that tells you when someone is breaking and entering doesn’t mean having one would help. The thing is, there is information I wouldn’t divulge to a stranger at a bus stop, and that information certainly doesn’t get published here.

PROBLEM 2: Ownership vs. Privacy

So what’s the difference between the photos I put up on flickr and the photos of me on facebook? If I publish my photos to flickr, I’m controlling the content. I have no control over who’s putting photos of me on facebook. But with facebook comes the illusion of granular control. Because there are privacy settings, people feel okay putting up pictures, regardless of whether they use those settings. I’m guilty of it, sometimes I post pictures of passerby that may not want to have their photos available for download. It’s a risk I take, because I use flickr as a platform for my work and as a way to share my life with friends and family, and generally, more good than ill comes of it. Just because I have ownership of that photo though, does not mean that I have no moral qualms about publishing pictures of my friends and family. The internet is great for sharing my travel pictures with those I know, and showcasing my photography to those I hope to know, but I’m uncomfortable knowing that there are photos of me floating around facebook that I don’t even know were taken. It’s not a supposition, it’s fact by now.

It all comes down to your boundaries. A fellow vlogger in Osaka that I follow, Scott from Unrested, brings up a good point about other people’s privacy. There are certain no-nos that we all seem to agree on, whether we’re in Japan or in America. You can’t just walk around filming anyone or anything. You can’t film (and often blog about) your workplace, for example, if you intend on keeping your job. While there are laws (as any photojournalist knows by heart) protecting your right to take pictures in public places and laws sanctioning your freedom of speech, singling out others and exposing parts of their lives is considered an invasion of privacy, culturally at least. Unrested is married, but he asserts that he will never show his wife or his children in his videos, and in my opinion, rightfully so. “This isn’t their hobby, this isn’t their craft,” he says, and as such it would be unfair to put their faces unwillingly in front of all to see via the interwebs. He takes the risk but doesn’t throw it upon others. Merlin Mann, on the other hand, has no problem discussing, filming, and posting pictures of his baby girl, Ellie. So for him, the line falls in a different place.

Where’s that line between personal and public? It appears to be wherever you can get away with drawing it, because who you are changes everything. If you’re Scott, who has a large number of subscribers and whose videos garner substantial view counts, your line has to be pretty clear. If you’re 14-year-old Jane from Salt Lake, you can probably post videos of your family reunion and nothing will come of it. If you’re Paris Hilton, you’ve got to be okay with that sex tape leaking out before you even film it. It might be unfair, especially as your standards change, but it’s a fact of life.

PROBLEM 3: Good vs. Bad Judgement

The other half of the problem with digital privacy is social. Anything you post can be used against you at any time, any place. Treat digital like it’s never truly gone, because that facebook photo could turn off a potential employer, and that twitter comment could get you fired. On the other half of the coin, anything you post will be used to support you at any time, any place. That potential employer might see your blog posts illustrate how knowledgeable you are about finance, and that video of you dancing might fund your next vacation. The problem is, socially we keep condemning people for having opinions and activities outside of their professional image, but then we keep asking them to. We’re expected to be social networkers but put ourselves out there and still carry the same cleaned up image politicians and their PR teams create. I’m not talking about reputation blemishes, I’m talking about having a public opinion, a public face. Be forward thinking and with the times, but only in an outdated, conservative way. As long as this dichotomy exists, we won’t be able to build clear legal and moral boundaries around online privacy.

I won’t lie, it terrifies me to think that years from now I might be regretting writing these very words as my interviewer asks me, “We see you’ve written on your website about Korea…” They can’t hold your support of gay marriage against you, but enjoying South Korean cinema could still be a liability, never mind that my two years of blog posts thus far illustrate I am reading and thinking about contemporary issues like healthcare and international relations, spending my time and money experiencing other cultures instead of, say, doing drugs in my mum’s basement and watching trash television. It’s a double standard in its own way; it’s great that you write but it’s still a strike against. I’m sure something somewhere will come back to bite me but I make no apologies, because I am presenting a true and honest version of myself. That’s my solution: to be the same person on my weblog that I am in real life. I’m not hiding my name or masking my whereabouts. I’m putting myself out there because I believe I have something to say, and hopefully my consistency and character will be enough to see it through.

CONCLUSION

Here’s where the real discussion begins, because in spite of all the dangers and all the problems that come with putting yourself so out there, people still do it. Personally, the benefits of blogging currently outweigh the risks. As someone is passionate about new media and would like to continue working in the field, not participating would deny me a great experience. Putting my work on display has allowed me to become a part of projects that would ordinarily never have come my way. The community of bloggers and vloggers has been a huge source of inspiration and both personal and professional development for me, and I enjoy giving back to the same society that supported me when I decided to become a serious traveller. If the costs start outweighing the benefits, then I’ll probably reconsider my participation, but for now I’m willing to put my word on the line for the better parts of the experience. There are of course still a great many risks, but I do my best to mitigate them.

I’m a person, not a robot, not a secret team writing under one alias, not a committee designed to test you. As such, I have feelings, I am under time constraints, and I always run the risk of upsetting someone. So let me lay this on the line: this website is my personal vantage on the world, comprised of thoughts, opinions, first hand accounts and experiences, and a good deal of speculation. At risk of sounding like a copyright disclaimer, please know the views expressed here are mine and mine alone, and the writing published here was penned by and belongs to me. I want to believe that I’m making a difference with the words I say, and I’d hate for anything to be a) taken out of context and misconstrued, b) passed off as something it isn’t, or c) held accountable as anything but my own thoughts, opinions, and experiences. While this website is my personal blog, this website is not professional writing. I am not a published writer at present or a professional journalist, in fact, I’m not even a civilian journalist, and I assure you there’s no team of editors proofreading, fact checking, and ghostwriting anything you see on the site. That said, I know I can get it wrong sometimes. If you find anything erroneous in my posts, just let me know. Email me, direct message me on twitter, leave a note in the comments, message me on youtube, however you let me know I would be grateful for the assistance and more than happy to do a little more research, correct the misinformation, or even take down something wildly off-base. If you disagree with what I write, I’m open to a dialogue. That’s the beauty of a blog: contact me, write or film a response, comment my posts, or even reference my site. While I refuse to entertain hatemail for hate’s sake, I am more than willing to consider and give credence to decent arguments and other valid viewpoints. I’m in it for the exploration and the discussion and the expression, not to shout down to the world from my soapbox.

Please also know that, like other bloggers, I often reference and link to other people’s material (though I will never republish it or claim it as my own). This is meant purely to spread the joy and share some of the neat stuff I love with the readers of this website. I think the world deserves to discover some of the amazing work people are doing and am often excited to further the word-of-mouth. If you happen to be making any of this content and are uncomfortable with my allusions, think I have violated your rights or privacy, or feel I have taken it too far, let me know. The last thing I want to do is prevent the artists and designers, figureheads and companies I admire from doing well, so I’d be happy to remove content or come to an accord that we can both agree on.

Sources from this post include merlin mann’s personal accounts, Joi Ito and his interview with the Japan Times, Scott from Unrested’s great videos, Barack Obama’s whitehouse.gov and Kevin Rose. If you look closely, you’ll find I’m not the only one being upfront about who I am and what I do. Chris Gen, John Eckman, The Budak, Cabel Sasser, Gary Arndt, Dustin Curtis, and too many others to count are doing the same thing.