lj, privacy, and identity maintenance

[lo5an]

So, in case you missed it, lj has added a tool to mass change the security level on old posts.

I just made all public posts from before 2007 into friends only posts. I think I'm probably going to do this at least once a year now, and I'll likely do something similar with my flickr account. Truly public stuff will probably all get moved elsewhere.

Comments

[lovimoment]

Why would one want to do this? Are our pasts more secret than our presnts?

[lo5an]

Yes :-)

In part, my relationship with my lj has changed and I just want to have a smaller public presence here.

I've had this account since 2001, and I don't particularly want to go through a half decade of posts and sort them.

Also, I've been thinking about the Internet, and memory, and things of this nature, and it seems natural to have some sort of forgetting mechanism.

I dunno. My ideas here are not all that well formed. I'm just thinking out loud, mostly.

[lovimoment]

Hmmm...a "half decade" sounds so much longer than "several years" somehow...

I never thought of myself as having a "relationship" with my LJ.

Point 2 in henrylyne's post seems to indicate that you can make, for instance, all public posts into friends-only posts, but in doing so you won't run the risk of making some private posts visible to friends, correct?

[lo5an]

Right, you change all posts of privacy level A to privacy level B. I made all public posts friends-only, and private posts weren't effected. Also, the tool doesn't currently do anything with custom privacy levels... so, if you've got posts that only a subset of your friends can see, those all won't be changed

[lovimoment]

For instance, it might be pretty easy to pretend to be someone's long lost classmate from 2003 after reading that part of their lj.

That has occurred to me...I've put most personal thoughts/info on various sorts of friends settings, but even my public entries, when taken all together, could basically allow you to know all of my opinions about everything. That, I think, is creepier. Maybe this is my Russia paranoia coming out, but I picture meeting some random person in a foreign country who manages to have exactly the same opinions or interests I do (or at least know what buttons to push) and hooking me into some creepy blackmail-and-espionage ring.

[lo5an]

Exactly.

Clearly, we both need therapy :-P

[lovimoment]

I am what they call a "high-functioning paranoid." :P