Friday log is up
Written on February 6, 2010
A. Lurkar rightly raised the issue that I haven’t yet protected my schedule from being indexed by the search engines and other web-crawlers. It’s possible that my week of Feb 01-07 will live on the internet forever.
I’m just not sure what kind of trouble this could cause me. There’s nothing particularly incriminating going on this week. I’m really struggling to figure out how someone could use this schedule to hurt me.
The people who could hurt me most, of course, are the people near to me – who know me. They’re the ones who have additional information which could give the schedule meaning.
For example, if Shaun knew I told Brad that I offered to help Brad with some programming stuff, he could tip Brad off that my Friday night was really being spent watching 80s television and playing Dragon Age.
There might be a possibility for someone to use this schedule to hurt me, but they’d better do it quick. The problem is, my schedule is dynamic. This week’s schedule is not a reliable indicator for future schedules – things change. If someone really wants to make my life miserable, they better do it quick.
The threat of data living on forever isn’t terrifying in this case, because if my schedule is findable in five years, it will be, well… It will be a trifle out of date.
Possibly the greatest real risk is that someone will find my schedule and judge me by it. What does it say about me? Does it say good things or bad things?
Perhaps I should put a little blurb up at the top which reminds everyone the diligence and strength of character required to log obsessively for a week. And then see if I can make the front page of reddit.
I dunno.
What do you think? If you click on the little “comment” link, you can let me know what your thoughts are.
Cheers.
Filed in: personalinthepubliceye.
Well, the greatest risk probably would be an employer or job related person finding it and somehow divining “bad” things about you from that, but I think the likelihood of them finding it and attaching it to you is pretty slight.
Umm… Very plausible. The domain is registered under my real name, so thehappymoron.com is very easily linkable to me the real person.
I only have one colleague as a facebook friend, but that one colleague is a link. If my boss ever befriended me I’d probably accept (things being as they are) and that would be the goodbye to my anonymity.
Another of my colleagues read this blog once. I don’t know if she follows it any more.
One day I could accidentally forward my boss a link to a document hosted on my site. The name of the site piques his interest and, whoops…
It’s not unthinkable.
Of course, what does this schedule say about me? Does it say bad things? Does it say good things?
All measurements are relative, and I don’t think that what is evidenced here (work habits, etc) is particularly terrible.
On the other hand, the schedule demonstrates a commitment to personal process and continuous improvement.
In a large part, an employer’s impression will largely depend on how I present it… and on their own personal neuroses, which I can’t control.
What is far riskier, in my mind, is how this schedule will combine with a hundred other little snippets of information posted – all benign and innocent on their own – to produce an exploitable or incriminating story that was built slowly and imperceptibly over time.
It’s impossible to predict what the potentials for exploitation could be for an accumulated database of tiny, innocent facts. The point is, once that database is built, it’s too late.
The rule of the internet future is, perhaps,
“Make it ridiculously easy for people to find good stuff about you.”
Well, the thing is, since I’m not paying you, I don’t really have much say. Time is money, and I’m not paying you anything…so you don’t really owe me any time. Or something like that.
That’s why I never accept payment for stuff like this
Context is everything, doesn’t A. Lurkar know that? I think of the proverbial needle in the haystack. If you could colour the straw black, maybe the needle would stand out.
Am I saying that your daily schedule would be lost in the midst of the trivia that makes up so much of the ethereal world? Maybe, mhm??
One other thing: don’t run for office
Haha! So very true!
I was thinking about that; what making running for office so special is not that the that the information becomes more sensitive, but that someone is guaranteed to look for (and most probably find) it.
One of my very first posts on this blog was about a prostitute who serviced the governor of New York.
http://thehappymoron.com/blog/2008/03/19/dont-become-accidentally-famous/
You remember the name Eliot Spitzer? When the scandal blew, all of her web presence (open for the most part) was gobbled up by the press and by the tabloids. It probably didn’t help that she was ridiculously pretty.
And it wasn’t even her scandal…
The entire security model of most of the web is: “people don’t care about me.”
Not, “People can’t find stuff about me.” or “The stuff about me is benign” but straight up, “People don’t care about me.”
And that can change in a flash.
But I’ll say this – the opinions and poorly filtered opinion rants I post on this blog will probably indict me long before my schedule will.