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.

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.

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

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

[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.