E-Paper
Guard your e-soul
As we stand at the tail end of the ‘decade of decadence’, netizens are waking up to the downside of their virtual personas, writes Rajiv Arora.
Mom’s the word for me when it comes to safekeeping of the ‘important’ documents that certify my existence. But on the Internet, where creating identities is a no-brainer, the question of who is the real guardian is turning out to be a big problem.
As we stand at the tail end of the ‘decade of decadence’, netizens are waking up to the downside of their virtual personas. Our prowess at making global unity a reality, though virtually, has laid foundations of an industry that thrives on our saleability quotient. The charm of putting up pictures on networking sites and indulging in carefree scribbling of what others should know about us is slowly giving way to data insecurity. Not just due to the contradiction of on and offline personalities, but also because the cloud of doubt still looms large over whether the user, who created the online identity owns it, or is it the organisation whose ware you use to make an avatar?
Search your name — in both web and images — and chances are that you would be lurking somewhere among the top 10 results, courtesy your social networking habits. In his book Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, author Adam L. Penenberg states how small businesses have struck it big by just making every consumer feel special. Fifteen minutes of fame is all that’s required to make users willingly give out their lives on the Net. While the ever-optimist Penenberg interprets it as a good business model (and rightly so), the implications of sharing all your secrets on the Net can be very damaging.
Both anonymity and masking aren’t viable solutions either. The only good that they have done is to the students of sociology, who aspire to take the Darwinian theory of evolution to the e-level. There’s no denying that technology has transformed the concept of the self. The question is do we really need to manage our virtual selves? If yes, to what extent?
A casual browse like you is the easiest target. As you take pride in showing off your most recent vacation or the purchase, the prying e-eyes are indexing every bit of data. Worst, you don’t even realise when things go awry. Google for ways to protect online identity and you will be overwhelmed with the responses. From various security softwares to routing websites, the industry is slowly gearing up to tackle a new problem.
Governments encourage technological advancements for security reasons. Private players play along for selfish ones. True information makes their job easier; fudged details make for tempting baits. Faceless enemies — faintly familiar people on your network, fellow gamers, online recruiters, online matchmakers, etc — further add to the perplexity. The solution lies in being alert, somewhere between addiction and abstinence. The former is liable to change but the latter, thankfully, is not open to multiple interpretations.
