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

[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.