Anti Social Media Behavior

cwimedia:

I’ve gone dark. I’m off the grid. I’ve become a ghost. Well, sort of. I am speaking, of course, about social media and the ever-increasing privacy concerns that come with posting information about your life online.

It started some time ago with Facebook and MySpace. My profiles were at one time public and anyone could see them. After getting a ridiculous number of unsolicited “friend” requests from people I didn’t know, and even some from people I actually did know, it was time to restrict access to those profiles.

I also had a accounts with, Plurk, Plaxo, SocialThing, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, Brightkite, Ping.fm and a bunch more sites. Clearly, I was on the social media overkill bandwagon. Well, no more.

In what a friend called a “scorched Earth campaign” against social media, I went through and canceled virtually all of my social media accounts, especially those that I don’t use any more. I was a bit shocked to discover that I had so many different accounts with varying degrees of personal information available to the world - some of it extremely outdated.

Here’s a partial list of the social media accounts I deleted:

• MySpace
• Digg
• Orkut
• FriendFeed
• SocialThing (bought by AOL, discontinued)
• MyBlogLog
• Squidoo
• 12seconds.tv
• Ping.fm
• Plaxo
• Brightkite
• Blogger (two blogs)
• Photobucket
• Plurk

Here’s a list of social media accounts I decided to keep, but with a restricted privacy level:

• Delicious
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Stumbleupon
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Wordpress.com
• YouTube

My Facebook is locked down pretty tight. I created multiple friend lists and restricted access to my personal data to less than 90 people, all people I trust. They are either family or friends.

Twitter is set to private and after after pruning my list of “followers,” my list is down to less than 300. So, why the sudden shift in attitude toward social media? There are several reasons, but first, why did I put all that information out there in the first place?

There was a time when I wanted my name, opinions, thoughts and qualifications out there for the whole world to see. I gloated about how I dominated the search engine results pages (SERPs) when you searched for Gary Cope. There was a time when I didn’t even show up on the first few pages. Social media was huge and niche sites were popping up left and right to cater to virtually any audience. Being a web geek and web professional, I felt an obligation to try the new “it” things as they came out.

I still have a personal blog on Tumblr, but I went through all of the nearly 1,700 posts over the last three years and took down any pictures or posts about my son. They’re still there, but are “private” and only I can see them from my admin page. Sure, they might still exist in some search engine cache file, but there’s nothing I can really do about that.

Going forward, however, I have created a password-protected Tumblr site for family and some select friends. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s better than going completely dark. I also post to Facebook, which is where most of my friends and family are anyway, so it’s not hard to keep them updated.

The recent social media enema was long overdue. I had more accounts than I could remember and more importantly, I felt a need to get my personal info off the web as much as possible. No more pictures of me and my son. Flickr got privatized, as did Twitter and my blog on Tumblr. I no longer feel the need to let the whole world know what I am doing. The world doesn’t really care, but my friends and family do, hence why I locked the sites down.

I realize that I can’t control all of the information available on the Interweb, but I can attempt to limit it.

If you have too many social media accounts to keep track of, or you are concerned about people you don’t know having to much access to your personal information, consider a “spring cleaning,” or “scorched Earth” campaign of your own.

It can be time-consuming and tedious, but once completed, I felt so much more organized and at ease.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions and/or stories to share about your social media experiences, let me know.