Private Communications in a Public World
September 15th, 2007 by MikeSeth Godin wonders:
In a world where twitter and facebook and blogs can spread an idea around the world in a few seconds, how do you have a conversation with someone in confidence?
I hadn’t really really thought about it until a few weeks ago when the contents of one of my emails (one I thought was private) found its way into a blog post.
Seth proposes that we include “NFYB” (Not For Your Blog) in emails that we want to remain private. While I like the idea, unless it finds widespread usage, the acronym is a bit clumsy.
I saw the following footer the other day on a listserv that I am on that I thought hit the mark.
This e-mail is [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private
I like the third category here that Seth NFYB doesn’t address, namely, that I wouldn’t mind certain people blogging the contents of a private email if I trust them and/or have talked to them about what they intend to blog.
Either way, I think it is a fascinating point that will only become more important in the future. Until shared cultural norms are in place, being explicit about the intended audience of your emails cannot hurt.
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September 16th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
umm…holla at that blog post so we can all be privy
September 16th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
This is hard. I try to keep in touch with the personalities of my friends with this one. I really think and overthink whether or not a friend of mine would want to be referenced in a blog entry. Many of my friends are very private and have a hard time when I reference them by name. I make mistakes sometimes. But I do not think the answer is for me to tell my friends that certain things are not for blogs. I think we have to fumble around about this for a while. We have to just try to understand each others’ boundaries a bit more. I am rambling now so I’ll stop.
September 17th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Don’t you hope - in general - that people would have the good taste to know that the only deeply personal things they really need to reference in their blogs are the deeply personal things that have happened to them?
I can see this if you’re communicating with someone in an extended community, but if your friends blog extensively, don’t you think this is an excellent general topic to have out there with your friends?
It just seems like a lot of extra energy to spend and I hate to imagine you putting on that ridiculously perfunctory tag every time you write me.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Oh come on. Do you really think I have the energy or the pretension to worry about whether someone blogs my boring ass emails? I wasn’t talking about this as a personal practice.
October 1st, 2007 at 6:47 pm
This is a good issue, I think. More important than it though will be once widespread audio and video recording of EVERYTHING that you do happens and is immediately uploaded and indexed online.
(This is where object contracts come in: I would have a device which protects my digital identity rights and its settings automatically prohibit your camera from being able to record a clear image of me. Sort of like the scramble suit in Scanner Darkly).
This recently came up for me, a private conversation which I assumed was in confidence was later re-counted out of context on a friend’s blog in such a way as to make it seem as though I said something about another person which I in fact did not say. It wasn’t a huge issue, but it points towards a really big issue. And the take-away for me was that I need to (1) be more clear about what I am really saying, and (2) keep certain things to myself unless I have a mutual (contractual?) securacy (security/privacy) agreement with another person that the contents of our interchange will not be disclosed, or at least not out of original context.
Imagine that: handing everyone some kind of digital NDA through a cell phone handshake protocol or something…