Be honest. It's easier.

[mattbell]

Apparently Facebook messages are a major factor in divorces now.  This isn't surprising.  If you tell your spouse you'll be in Place A doing Thing A, but you end up going to Place B and doing Thing B, it's getting easier for them to find out.  Even if you turn off Google Latitude and other location-based services and don't post about your actions, you still might run into someone else who will photograph you, put it online, and tag you.

This goes for non-relationship things as well.  If you email someone that you're too tired to go to their party, but you really aren't going because you heard about another party that you want to hit up, they're more likely to find out now.  You could tell *everyone* at the party not to post online that you went, but that's a lot of work, it requires their cooperation, and it makes you look bad.  

I imagine that relatively soon there will be "stalker" software that will track a person's appearances, actions, and movements across multiple social networks and location-based services, allowing you to synthesize all online information about them available to you into a coherent story of their actions.  However, it won't be called "StalkPro"... it will be something more like "FriendFinderPro" and will be marketed as a way of seeing what cool stuff a specific friend is up to and what you could join in on.  It will be the newest, most efficient way to catch up on what the people you care about are up to.  Everyone will love it.  

Opting out of the digital world entirely is not an option, since others will post about you.  So ultimately, the only two options are to live honestly or quickly acquire a reputation for being dishonest.  Your choice.  

Comments

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

and this is why i always opt for the brutally honest option.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I was a crappy lier long before the internet, so I pretty much gave up on it :

[dichro.livejournal.com]

I strongly approve of the trend. With that said, my tendencies towards openness were set at a fairly early age, after a period of conscious experimentation with mendacity, and I can't say that it has consistently worked all that well. In recent years I've definitely come to appreciate the merits of a well-partitioned lifestyle, and I particularly enjoy having Facebook/Twitter/LJ/etc as the open-access portal where putative friends can check in advance for any potential surprises down the line.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Well-partitioned and open is an interesting mix -- if I understand you correctly, you make everything public so people can find more out if they want to know more, but you do make efforts to keep your different manifestations of your identity for different spheres of life separate so that people who don't google you don't find out more? Or did you mean something different?

[dichro.livejournal.com]

That's about the shape of it, yes. Luckily, I find talking about other people to be vastly more interesting than talking about myself, so restricting the set of subjects that I bring up in any given conversation is no burden. Having friends with less decorum around often results in breaches of the principle though, and I do confess to enjoying the effects when that happens; I just wouldn't choose to trigger it myself.

THIS

[valdelane.livejournal.com]

Spoofing meatspace tracks will just get harder over time as cameras, sensors, and taggers (human and AI) become more ubiquitous. I agree, just be honest.

Re: THIS

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Thinking more about it, I believe much of the personal dishonesty that people will get away with in the more distant future will happen inside people's heads - knowing that they can't get away with dishonest behaviors, they will instead suppress the expression of parts of themselves. This is of course sad, but people have been doing it for centuries.

Re: THIS

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a step backwards in this case, though, if people used to be able to do things like visit gay bars in secret, and then they stop being able to. I hope this trend is at least counterbalanced by broader acceptance of a wider range of behaviors, so that less stuff needs to be hidden or suppressed.

Re: THIS

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Yeah, society could end up going two very different directions -- transparent permissive or transparent restrictive. I think the former is much healthier, and societies that choose this path will flourish. However, there are many groups that will seek to take advantage of this transparency to push things in a more restrictive direction. It will be interesting.

Re: THIS

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

I would be willing to bet that with true transparency, you would rarely have any "transparent restrictive" states. Intolerance starts to wash away when you realize a given behavior is not nearly as secret and "deviant" as you thought. Most of it is based on a lack of information.

Re: THIS

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

There's some possibility of this -- a narrowly restricted society would eventually end up breaking from the consequences of so many people struggling with and transgressing arbitrarily set boundaries. Suppressing harmless deviant behavior takes a huge toll on a society's productivity.

However, I have seen instances of very transparent restrictive environments - people at certain large companies have all their emails monitored and are under constant video surveillance. I'm sure there's a difference between being in this environment 8-10 hours a day and being in it your whole life, but I believe a society under these kinds of restrictions 24-7 is possible.

Re: THIS

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

Well, you haven't said how that system is restrictive yet, you just show that it's transparent (and at that I assume only to the management). I would guess you are implying they are making sure people are using their time "productively". If that, then it's a one-sided and closed system with behavioral rules that are tacitly accepted by those being watched. Not very reflective of everyday privacy concerns.

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much just another angle on David Brin's Transparent Society argument.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I should really read that book.

[sacra-imbri.livejournal.com]

I have no doubt that with the tech gear currently available, you can know just about every breath someone else takes. I find that seeming superficially vanilla allows the existing biases of conservative types to just assume I'm uninteresting. Beyond that, I've found that scrupulous fidelity keeps most people from questioning one's honesty.