Now, everybody knows you’re a dog

© 1993 The New Yorker

You’ve probably heard the expression, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

That was then. The days of online anonymity are behind us. Hundreds of millions of people routinely share information about themselves online, and public records are online for hundreds of millions more. Now, everybody knows you’re a dog — and they know a lot of other things about you too.

But do they know the things you want them to know about you? Do you act the same and share the same information with everyone in your life? Probably not. Family, friends, neighbors, business associates, all see different sides of your personality and know different things about you.

But that’s not how it is online. There’s a a fundamental disconnect between our online and offline identities. Pew Internet & American Life Project’s Amanda Lenhart comments:

Our offline identities and the manner in which we manage them are complex. Even with advances in privacy controls we still do not have perfect online analogs for the subtleties of offline interactions and relationships.

Most social networks, which are increasingly becoming the centers of our online identity management, do a very poor job at allowing us to segregate the various facets of our online identity. Plaxo has made some steps in that direction, but it doesn’t seem to be too well integrated into the service, other than as built-in categories. (And who really uses as Plaxo their primary social network, anyway?)

And even in the age of fine-grained privacy tools, those tools do not eliminate the complexity of figuring out how to best present oneself in a multi-use public space, particularly for those who have personal, professional and family contacts on these sites. Not only that, on Facebook, how others use the site through comments, wall posts and tags and how that information is connected to you via that other person’s feed, also adds additional layers of complexity to online identity management.

Until you can reasonably control what personal information you share and who you share it with, do you censor yourself online?