An Internet Where Everyone Knows You’re a Dog

What are the chances that, even though you deleted your account at the last change in the terms, that he’s not keeping and selling your information according to those terms anyway?

Didn’t Facebook start with Zuckerberg hacking into a university server and copying private photos of other undergraduates onto his website? Given that beginning it would be surprising if respect for people’s privacy was a big concern of his.

My gut is to agree with Farhad Manjoo’s latest column on the subject: people are going to grouse about Facebook’s privacy policy for awhile but ultimately accept it. This will be in part because social networking sites are prompting a redefinition of one’s public persona. But maybe this redefinition is not just a matter of their eroding some traditional notion of privacy, but also a greater willingness among all of us out there in the public to take part in the compartmentalization of each other’s projected selves.

People will always display different personas to different audiences, and a piece of communication technology that doesn’t acknowledge that fact is going to generate friction, as is happening here. However, how much of the ability to maintain different personas relies on those personas being completely concealed from their unintended audiences, and how much is a cooperative effort in which the audiences take part? Seeing your boss do an idiotic dance at the office Christmas party doesn’t inevitably eviscerate their authority. You might just think, “so that’s a peek behind the curtain” and then resume a professional distance on Monday. Or look at the examples Henry gives about himself here: he feels that he has a different persona on Crooked Timber than on The Monkey Cage, even though it’s no secret that the same person is contributing to both. Plus if everybody has a drunken college picture somewhere online, the shock value of drunken college pictures will go way down.

Now I’m curious: what kind of information would people be willing to have visible to their Facebook friends but not to the world at large?

My answer to that question is “Nothing”. I have always assumed that Facebook is a public medium and posted accordingly, and as a result don’t care about their privacy policy. What’s the sticking point for other people?

In other words, “You have no privacy. Get over it.” If “you have one identity” is the rule, the only identity is the public identity, and it will overwhelm all else in a stifling conformity. In Zuckerberg’s internet, not only does everyone know you are a dog, but what breed of dog you are. Most people look down on you for it and some people want to eliminate your breed entirely.

I suspect that, if sufficient detective work were done, we would find that Zuckerberg has a private life which he jealously guards, and will fight very hard to keep private. Every snoop I’ve ever known or heard of takes pride in knowing while not being known, and I doubt Zuckerberg is an exception.

What are the chances that, even though you deleted your account at the last change in the terms, that he’s not keeping and selling your information according to those terms anyway?

p = 0

I suspect that, if sufficient detective work were done, we would find that Zuckerberg has a private life which he jealously guards, and will fight very hard to keep private.

p =1

This has been another edition of “Fun with Certainties”.

Engels @ 11

Well, there is Orkut…

http://www.orkut.com/Main#about.aspx

http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html

is a project to build a secure social network, where you get to keep control of your data. A fine shining idea, remains to be seen if it will survive implementation.
As Vance notes, it’s not as if anyone but the privacy geeks seem to care about Facebook’s policies.

I note in particular that none of the founders of Diaspora are women.

Croak!

As Vance notes, it’s not as if anyone but the privacy geeks seem to care about Facebook’s policies.

On the other hand, at the moment 3853 people have pledged a total of $139,982 for Diaspora, a wee bit more than their $10,000 goal.

See http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr.

(‘Scuse me, make that 3857 people have raised $140,047 — not a huge difference until you realize that it happened while I was writing this message. Oops, now it’s 3859 and $140,077. I mean 3860 and $140,102. And I’m not going to look again!)

Yarrow, I’m not at all arguing that the privacy concerns are wrong. (Indeed I just “deleted” my Facebook account.) I’m glad people are supporting Diaspora. But on the question of whether any of this matters to Facebook or its user base, I’m from Missouri.

“But on the question of whether any of this matters to Facebook or its user base, I’m from Missouri.”

Yes, certainly we must wait until disaster occurs before taking preventative steps.

If people would like to work with an apparently-honest social networking service, I recommend Dreamwidth. Google, as usual, is not-so-evil.

An issue not usually mentioned in these discussions is that various government security agencies and criminal organizations probably monitor social networks. Likely No Such Agency mines all data posted on Facebook, privacy-flagged or not and who knows who else does? The spooks are watching, and so are the mafia, the tangs, and Odin knows what-all else.

Henry, thanks for that – any further suggestion for a recent work in the line of Sennett and/or Gofman?

I have never been on Facebook and everything everybody else said to me about it has convinced me I missed nothing. I also think this ‘true identity’ thing of Zuckerman is a clear example of a lack of humanity.

But I don’t agree we should be secretive about our identities. Like Henry did, it’s quite possible to be open about it – without neutralizing them. The world would be far better if we could not think of examples like the one of the gay person above. I know it is not like that and until it is we need privacy but this does not mean privacy is a goal; rather the absence of a need for privacy should be the goal.

The absence to have to argue against the Zuckermans about one’s integrity is an added bonus.

“Seeing your boss do an idiotic dance at the office Christmas party doesn’t inevitably eviscerate their authority. You might just think, ‘so that’s a peek behind the curtain’ and then resume a professional distance on Monday. Or look at the examples Henry gives about himself here: he feels that he has a different persona on Crooked Timber than on The Monkey Cage, even though it’s no secret that the same person is contributing to both.”

This. One identity does not mean the end of privacy, imagination, or discretion. It does not mean all-revealing, monolithic selves. It means the end of multiple distinct public selves. Any illusion western society may have furnished of cleanly segmented social spaces, in which we are all Don Drapers alternating between lives and expecting anyone who witnessed a line-transgression to shut their eyes and ears, is over. Social spaces overlap. Groups function better as conduits of disclosure than containers of secrets. That’s not an unqualified good, but neither is it some foreign seed planted in our culture by evil Internet companies.

I think you’re not actually allowed to, but I made up an alias when I signed up to Facebook. Boy did that ever make much of this debate irrelevant. Of course, you probably can’t find me if you don’t have my e-mail and all you remember of me is my name. I’m totally fine with that.

I’m going to head down a contrarian path with a few thoughts that have occurred to me after reading this post and its comments:

What if all of “our” fears (i.e. expressed in this thread and via what’s been hyped in the print media) are precisely the opposite of why Facebook might fail? I mean, isn’t the problem with electronic media its mere two-dimensionality? In other words, might it be the case that Facebook fails because it can’t deliver on its “promise” (read: Zuckerberg’s apparent dream) to collapse, or unify, our identities?

Take, for instance, comment flaming and out-of-control comment sections. To me, they seem indicative of people’s frustration with ~not~ being able to express themselves fully.

And Facebook can be frustrating in precisely the same way. The medium allows you only a glimpse of the “latest” on someone, and briefly at that. That kind of presentation lends itself to incomplete readings of others, as well as to incomplete presentations of the self.

And this inability to communicate ourselves—via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or even in standard paper letters—is ultimately based on our ability, as a society and world, to educate ourselves and our youth to read and write properly. All communication media are inherently limited by our education deficiencies.

So even if Zuckerberg wanted a grandiose unification of identity via Facebook, the things that would make the unification possible are completely out of his control—outside the realm of mere media. Facebook is only as good as the in-common ability of its users. And as it grows to include those who are less interested or able to communicate themselves, Facebook’s ability to expose us—to undermine our privacy—will be diminished due to the inability of its new members to understand properly the limited identities presented on screen.

In sum, the fears about Facebook’s ability to undermine privacy are dependent on factors (e.g. user energy, user communication ability, etc.) well outside of Zuckerberg’s dreams and the fears of a Zuckerberg Big Brother.

My apologies for any rambling you detect in this comment. I’m writing off my virtual cuff. – TL

This isn’t an issue I’ve given any thought to, but I’d hate to see any attempt to defend the legitimacy of “public man,” as it existed in the past, gloss over the fact that his existence was possible only so long as “private woman” existed. Certainly I would agree that the idea of having some “one true self” which is more genuine or legitimate than other parts of your ‘self’ doesn’t hold up. But these ‘selves’ can’t be clearly separated into ‘public’ and ‘private’ without playing into very male conceptions of society. Any benefits society gained from those distinctions are surely outweighed by the price paid in terms of inequalities of gender roles.

I’ll be interested to have a closer look at Sennett’s book, and hope that’s an issue he addresses; it would be good to see how.

“what kind of information would people be willing to have visible to their Facebook friends but not to the world at large?”

My politics. I don’t put them on my facebook page, precisely because facebook will share them with the world at large. But I would love to have a social network that would actually only share what I want it to share to the people I’ve designated. I try to use facebook discreetly, because I only joined recently, and therefore I understand how irrelevant any restrictions on privacy have become. But I would LOVE to have a forum where I could construct an honest identity to my friends, online.

I don’t want a person who has just met me, a person I work for, or a person who works for me, to find out what my politics are, because I understand the corrosive effects that it can have on working relationships.

A case in point: my sister-in-law is being bullied by her boss. He gives her unreasonable assignments, criticizes her constantly, and applies stricter standards on her than on anyone else in her group. He used to be fine. Her husband’s mother is suffering from ALS, and, as is culturally appropriate in her social world, they have discussed assisted suicide with mom, since by the time comes that she might want it, mom won’t be able to talk. She mentioned this at work; work that used to a place where she didn’t need to worry about concealing things like dealing with dying parents. Her boss immediately started treating her very badly. It appears that he thought that her approach was morally equivalent to publicly discussing an eagerness to murder her mother-in-law.
Now, she made an identity-revealing mistake here; she didn’t know to conceal that information. But Facebook makes that mistake for us.
Facebook feels to me like a great social interchange where I would present myself similar to at a neighborhood potluck, a family reunion, or a wedding- lots of happy chit-chat, none of it deeply personal, but social. The fact that my employees can see what I say there keeps me from engaging in it in that way, and I would really like to.

I am a female, liberal boss in a 3% female, overwhelmingly conservative industry. The guys who work for me probably figure that I’m pro-abortion and pro-gun control, but there’s a world of difference between them suspecting that and me actually telling them. I work with some fundamentalist Christians, and I can guess at their beliefs based on subtle cues. We get along fine. The month I had to work with a fundamentalist Christian who filled me in on his beliefs periodically throughout the day remains the worst month of my working life.

The Zuckerberg comment about having more than one’s public identity is pure hypocrisy from a guy whose profile is locked down. The rest of us can’t keep up with FB’s constantly changing rules and preferences, let alone its self-writing ‘privacy’ policies.

I applied for a lobbyist job with FB a while back and am increasingly thinking I really dodged a bullet in not getting picked. It was weird applying for a job THROUGH facebook, knowing the people who got the application were going to read my whole profile.

I hope FB’s org-wide privacy meeting yesterday may knock some sense into those who clearly need it. On the policy side they have some really great people working there, and I get the impression the company would do a lot better by actually listening to these people’s perspective before launching these misguided and tin-eared changes rather than just pay them to clean up the mess afterwards.

This. One identity does not mean the end of privacy, imagination, or discretion. It does not mean all-revealing, monolithic selves. It means the end of multiple distinct public selves. Any illusion western society may have furnished of cleanly segmented social spaces, in which we are all Don Drapers alternating between lives and expecting anyone who witnessed a line-transgression to shut their eyes and ears, is over.

Going back to my sins of omission as opposed to sins of commission: I think it’s perfectly okay to have multiple public personas as long as they are not contradictory public personas. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be orthogonal, of course: in one setting I’m mostly an algebraic geometer talking in the language of schemes and using homological algebra; in another, I’m part of a parent network that shuttles the kids to and from various extracurricular activities. There just isn’t a lot of intersection there except insofar as it affects my scheduling.

Otoh, I also know some fairly unpleasant people (don’t we all) who will, for example, adopt an extremely fundamentalist persona on one group, but will also pose as a shout-out Randite atheist on another. We have a name for those sorts of creatures :-) I don’t see how tolerating that sort of behaviour is good for anybody.

The justifications for multiple identities are all well and good, but surely the answer to Zuckerberg is “F*ck off, it’s none of your business how many identities I have. And if you’re going to start calling me names because of my choice, well f*ck off squared.”

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Integrity being a modernist trope, Orwellian ne0liberalism is the apotheosis of Modernity.
Sounds about right to me. But not to get to Zizekian about this, by protesting Facebook policy you’re merely protesting yourselves. Does your intellectual ideal really offer any alternative to the flatness Zuckerberg prescribes? Not really. There aren’t really varieties of rational actor, nor do they leave room for “perspectives”. With all the past focus on universal knowledge this colloquy of multiplicities you envision (in opposition) is already beside the point. But maybe this is buyers remorse?

If, for example, I was a gay student – or indeed a gay faculty member in this institution, I might regard the ability to present a different identity in different contexts as essential to maintaing some sense of integrity.

This is certainly the case, but one of the arguments of gay liberation in the 70s was that the solution to this kind of oppression was to manifest queer identity in every context. Regardless of whether to conceal or whether to celebrate, what’s key is the ability of the individual to manage their identities. what scares me about Facebook is that by selecting from thousands of single data points, unseen others can construct identities for us that are “true,” in some sense of that word, but nothing that we would recognize as being ourselves. The ubiquitous “Which Spice Girl Are You” quizzes that abound on FB are caricatures of a more sophisticated process that’s going on invisibly.

I am in complete agreement with The Raven — Facebook is a feminist issue, and so far Dreamwidth is the solution.

For instance, WP McNeill said:
what kind of information would people be willing to have visible to their Facebook friends but not to the world at large?

My answer to that question is “Nothing”.

And this answer proves that you have never had to worry about being sexually harrassed.

But a majority of Facebook’s users are female, and a lot of them are young. I guess that the lifetime risk of being stalked or systematically harrassed, for a teenage girl, is probably 50% or higher — that is, at some time in the present or future course of her life, she has at least a 50:50 change of having to dodge someone persistent, creepy, and potentially dangerous.

Zunderberg — and you — are using a “reasonable man” standard for the expectation of privacy, except that Zunderberg actually locks down his profile quite tightly. I’m sure he says that it’s because he has an exceptional risk of harrassment, he’s a special high-profile snowflake who deserves special rules.

But really, he’s not more vulnerable than a typical teenage girl, and FB’s defaults should match the “reasonable teenage girl” standard. Any social network that doesn’t is DOIN IT RONG, and the reason The Raven and I favor Dreamwidth is that it’s the only platform being built by former teenage girls, who don’t have to keep reminding themselves to stick to that standard.

The single-identity, let-it-all-hang-out approach is libertarian — the kind of libertarianism that leads to thinking of 1880 as the Golden Age of Liberty (because only straight rich white males are real people, after all — everyone else is just support staff).

Doctor Science, that’s a wonderful rule, and I’ll swipe it with acknowledgement.

Parse, it turns out – unsurprisingly – that ’70s ideas of gay liberation were flawed. Not so much wrong as incomplete, both for a fair number of people then and for more now after another generation of crony capitalistic and technological evolution.

Isn’t it at least as appalling for employers not to want to hire people based on an involuntary CV as it is for Suckerberg to want to condemn everybody for behaving the same all of the time? Or, as it is for people to abuse the anonymity they have behind a screen to barge in somewhere – on someone – without even bothering to knock?

if she has documentation for her statistic of 50% girls eventually getting harassed, I’d like to see it.

Such documentation doesn’t exist, because today’s teenagers haven’t had their lifetimes yet. 50% is a personal, conservative guess at a lower bound, based on (a) the fact that a woman’s lifetime risk of rape is something like 25%, and harrassment is much more common than rape, and (b) my personal knowledge of the life histories of assorted women in our 50s and older. My *actual* estimate for women in my cohort (born in the 1950s) is that 80% or more have been harrassed or stalked at a level that would be dangerous if our lives had been lived at current levels of electronic record-keeping (FB, email, cell phone pictures, etc), but that’s a highly hypothetical number and I don’t even know how you’d get a concrete one.

bianca, if you want that much control over what happens maybe the internet should not be your first worry. Do you think none of that happens outside of Suckerberg’s (& similar) sites? On this here internet it seems I can have more control since I can call myself Earnest and I do not know anybody that finds Earnest interesting enough to find out whether his creator is or is not O’Nest.

Ah, you mistook me for Suckerberg then. I can assure you: I am not him. As to what my point is here: I don’t think many people are out hacking my comments to trace my IP address to my real home. If they are, I’m sure they are being very criminal about it.

The single-identity, let-it-all-hang-out approach is libertarian—the kind of libertarianism that leads to thinking of 1880 as the Golden Age of Liberty (because only straight rich white males are real people, after all—everyone else is just support staff).

This is exactly right; Zuckerberg’s position really reflects a privileged majoritarian position in a society where “wealthy white male” is sort of the default, since a wealthy white male like him has the privilege of assuming that no one needs to maintain much distance between their private and public lives; wealthy white males like him have the least social need to do so. But when Sennett talks “about the collapse of people’s ability to create public personae for themselves that differ radically from their private selves,” he’s describing a kind of differentiation that has a very particular value and salience to minority communities (of every sort), for whom that schism describes very important and basic kinds of double consciousness. To the extent that one is not society’s “default” type, one has not only the most opportunity to make use of different personas (the Obama in ben’s chili bowl, after all, is not the Obama of the state of the union, whereas W and Palin get most “American” when they pour on the Texan or Alaskan), but often the most to lose by failing to differentiate between them. As much as being in the closet might suck, lots of people lose really important things when they get outed, which is why it’s so important that they make the choice themselves, but that’s just an extreme example of tsomething that obtains at all sorts of levels of society. In short, privacy means something very different depending on where you stand, and it’s non-majority communities that best understand the value of double consciousness, however one theorizes it.

By the way, one thing I think it’s useful to remember about Zuckerberg is that he’s a 25 year old billionaire. Such people are not normal.

Does Zuckerberg owe any one of you anything? More to the point, should a (ab?)normal 25 year old majoritarian white male American billionaire owe any one of you anything? You folks spit on the crown, only to polish it.

‘Rapoport’, I don’t get it. But it sure sounds funny ;-)

Facebook is no different that any other amoral corporate entity. They are in business to make money. That is what feeds them, and it is the god they worship. If sacrificing your privacy brings them more money, so be it.

But unlike most corporations, Facebook is in a very rare space with members like Google Microsoft, and wanna be Apple. They have the very rare opportunity to make more money than any other company in the world via a monopoly. Like Big Oil’s monopoly on energy, Facebook and friend’s monopoly is information. If they control all of your information, they control you and can charge you whatever they see fit. By the way that information monopoly doesn’t just allow them to control individuals but every other business in the world.

It can be a difficult concept to get your head around but when you do it is a very scary thing.

This is exactly right; Zuckerberg’s position really reflects a privileged majoritarian position in a society where “wealthy white male” is sort of the default, since a wealthy white male like him has the privilege of assuming that no one needs to maintain much distance between their private and public lives; wealthy white males like him have the least social need to do so.

Don’t wealthy white men, many of them Republican office holders, find that the collapse of distance between their private and public lives pops up to bite them on the ass on a fairly regular basis? It doesn’t look to me so much like wealthy white men don’t need to maintain the distance as that they are confident (and sometimes overconfident) that they have enough power and money so that other people wil maintain that distance for them.

Facebook is no different that any other amoral corporate entity.

Rick, no argument on most of what you say. But your first sentence gets at the problem pretty exactly. Zuckerberg could sell what his customers want, following ordinary business and legal ethics, asking experts for their advice, and recognizing that a college student with no experience in the business world might have something to learn from people who do have such experience. That wasn’t good enough for him (to judge by his recent public statements). It seems he wanted to sell an emotional experience, to be the rah-rah freshman orientation facilitator who’s going to tell everybody how they should interact. He wanted to be moral; he wanted his corporation to do moral stuff; he wanted to sell a product that nudged people towards being moral–as he understands what “moral” means.

Now that’s fine, I guess. We can just use another product that provides an experience that matches what we think “moral” means. And we can make our own public statements, demonstrating that his opinion is not really very widely held at all.

But it is widely held that the amoral is moral… in the long run.

…Eh. This is pretty far afield. I’m still pretty sure that Tom Slee won this thread, squar’d.

I don’t defend “integrity.” at least not as much as it applies to the intentions of the actor. Integrity is for an audience to judge, not the speaker. But integrity, and sincerity etc. are central to the assumptions of modern liberalism, which likewise defends “objectivity” and “reason” all judged by the speaker and his friends but not by outsiders/others.

“It might then be taken to follow that it is morally better for people who—for social reasons—aren’t capable of this kind of independence and integrity to keep out of public life and intellectual discussions, ”

And there have been plenty of arguments from liberals for just such a policy, hence my snark about JS Mill. There was even a defense on this page of academic freedom as predating and therefore more important than freedom of speech for the public, and arguments here calling explicitly for limits on the latter. To answer those and your own assumption: there is no relation to the priestly celibacy and academic freedom. Academic freedom is not idealistic at all and strictly speaking it’s not about freedom. If it were anyone could become an academic by arguing for anything. Academic “freedom” is no more than the independence given those who have followed the rules long enough to be free of the reins. Its beginnings are in freemasonry, in the stone cutters who were granted the right to cut their own details. Celibacy is idealist law for a priestly caste in a monarchist rule. Academic independence at its fullest is the democratic understanding that its better to risk error than restrain curiosity. It’s granted by a democratic society to a group, not by that group to themselves.
Google says their golden rule is “Do no evil” and to you that means something.
In fact it means nothing. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” That’s your own puritan modernism and idealism coming back to bite you in the ass.

You put it right out there: Teachers as the new priestly class. And anti-democratic.

It’s interesting to compare facebook’s approach to these multiple personae, and privacy, with that of the Japanese social networking site mixi. Facebook isn’t yet that popular in Japan, but mixi is, and mixi is incidentally much stronger about privacy and disguised identity. No-one uses their real name and it’s very easy to completely hide your real identity – it’s generally assumed that you are. It’s also possible to lock the entire system so that only friends can see anything about you beyond your public profile (and this is the default setting), and they have strong rules for reporting or blocking anyone who contacts you.

Japanese have a very strong concept of tachiba, a kind of notion of position interpreted literally as “standing place,” and are very comfortable with the idea that you have different behaviour for different tachiba, and they are naturally averse to any kind of social interaction (digital or real) which forces them to mix these. They don’t mix work and family life, they don’t mix clubs and drinking friends, and so on. Their social networking sites reflect this distinction very carefully, whereas I notice that facebook users often mingle friends and work in what can only be a very dangerous combination.

The facebook creators clearly see this as a feature of their site, not a bug, but I much prefer the mixi approach. I am surprised that so many people allowed facebook into their lives given it’s lack of privacy and anonymity – I thought that these were things most people valued on the internet.

I have had a facebook account for about a year now. I opened it using a sockpuppet email account I keep for IT security work I do. On facebook I am a minor character from a 50’s sit-com. People that know me & I want to have contact with know who my sockpuppet is – as for “old friends” or High School jerk-offs finding me – who cares?

I had none of my personal info on it until about a week ago when my college age son decided to list me as his father on his page. He does not see the privacy issue. I see that itself as a problem with his generation, they are so used to facebook levels of exposure that privacy has become a minor concern.

@sg – I had never heard of mixi, but it is great to know that there are alternative privacy architectures for social networking sites.

I am surprised that so many people allowed facebook into their lives given it’s lack of privacy and anonymity – I thought that these were things most people valued on the internet

Since I first got online in 1996 I’ve always hated “walled gardens” like Compuserve, AOL and, er, Facebook; I’ve always worked on the basis that I was putting stuff out there which could in principle be seen by literally anyone. At the same time, I’ve never really liked pseudonyms; with only a few exceptions, I’ve always either used my full name or made it fairly straightforward to trace my full name, e.g. by putting it on my blog. Putting the two together, I’ve always seen myself as a single person with multiple social circles (pretty much as I am in real life); the Phil Edwards who comments on CT looks a bit different from the Phil Edwards who writes about Italian terrorists, the one who sings folk song, the one who used to write about WebSphere, the one who used to work for Red Pepper, the one who’s into real ale and the one who used to hang out on comp.software.year-2000 and devised the Edwards Scale of anticipated Y2K severity (widely criticised by the survivalist tendency among our regulars for stopping at 5 (TEOTWAWKI) rather than going into detail on the possible gradations of the coming doom)… But I’m not ashamed of any of them & wouldn’t want to conceal any of them from potential or actual employers, friends or partners; they’re all me.

So I don’t really understand anonymity, let alone the use of multiple ‘identities’ – it seems like a lot of hard work for a benefit I’m not sure I even want. On the other hand, I do understand compartmentalisation & multiple personae – I certainly don’t want to have “Phil Edwards the blue-suited folk-singing ale-drinking pinko Y2K geek who knows about terrorism” hung round my neck every time I open the virtual door.

Was it our “Sebastian” who sent in Henry’s book cover to Photoshop Disasters”?

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the posting had merit (stray watermarks are thin stuff by their standards) — but to wonder, in this context, at the pseudonym.

I also don’t understand the distinction Phil is drawing here:

So I don’t really understand anonymity, let alone the use of multiple ‘identities’ – it seems like a lot of hard work for a benefit I’m not sure I even want. On the other hand, I do understand compartmentalisation & multiple personae – I certainly don’t want to have “Phil Edwards the blue-suited folk-singing ale-drinking pinko Y2K geek who knows about terrorism” hung round my neck every time I open the virtual door.

What’s the line between an “identity” and a “persona”? Phil admits he prefers his personae not to bleed into one another; so at least a soft, provisional or ludic compartmentalization is all right by him. But evidently not a hard, permanent or serious one. For some reason.

Why do you imagine that, Kaveh? Not being conspiratorial, just wondering why you’re confident that the extra step of recording the change history of those fields rather than just their current values has not been taken.

I don’t really have an axe to grind here. On the non-alarmist side of the ledger, I’ll note that the note FB sent me on deletion did not say quite what Anderson reports: rather, it said I have 14 days from my request to change my mind. But on the other side there’s OpenBook.

Vance: What’s the line between an “identity” and a “persona”?

I don’t know, but it seems like a useful distinction to me. Just thinking aloud, really.

I guess the difference is that the person who uses multiple personae is not necessarily covering his/her tracks – he/she is fairly relaxed about the possibility of any of those personae being linked back to him/her. If the connection between you and your ‘persona’ is a secret to be avowed only to close and trusted friends, then it’s an ‘identity’. Maybe.

Dr Sci: I’m intrigued by this “tolerance of different viewpoints” of which you speak. I wonder what it would look like.

I think I calculated on Unfogged that I have routinely used seven different screen-names, in different communities, of which five are current. When I get a bit less busy (I so shouldn’t be reading this thread today) I might scribble down the rationale. I’m not especially bothered by exposure: I don’t troll, I don’t really get into fights and I don’t have a virtual papertrail of embarrassing details to come back and bite me.