Next time, Gadget. Next time …

I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.
Robert Browning

On the day of Facebook’s Timeline mandatory roll out, it begs the question: What does your digital legacy say about you?

It’s now common practice for employers, current and prospective romantic partners, parents, spouses, and one day our children to Google us and get the dirt on the lives we live in cyber space. Now we have Timeline: a compulsory update to your Facebook profile that let’s people (depending on your privacy settings) search through your digital life as they see fit. Got an ex partner that’s a friend of a friend? How much can they see? Got your ex-inlaws friended so they can see pictures of their grandkids? You think they aren’t taking note every time you mention you’re going out for a night with the girls/guys? Are you posting images of your children online and building their digital legacy before they can even walk?

In an age where we can buy a digital grave site for loved ones as you would a burial plot like the ones offered at Virtual Memories, or even free services like 1000 Memories, (a more comprehensive list can be found at The Digital Beyond) there is a concerted attempt to preserve everything you do or say online. Even if you go to the extent of deleting blog posts or even blogs in their entirety, based on the Terms of Service you agreed to when you signed up, chances are every word you wrote is preserved with your name tied to it. But to what end?

As a student of culture, to have such a vast source of material to draw conclusions from as the population moves its collective mind between issues, concerns and ideologies would be priceless. However it comes at the cost of our ongoing freedoms as we relinquish the rights to our words, pictures, thoughts, our digital legacy itself over and over again with no real guidelines as to how that information may be used in the future.

Try this exercise (though some of you probably have already): Google your name. Or even Pipl it. Never heard of Pipl? Neither had I until a friend Googled their name to find all his various profiles from different social networks (Myspace etc.) had been gathered by this site (without his knowledge or expressed consent) and laid them out in front of us with one click. Even more disturbing is their search parameters: name, email, username, location and phone number. How much old stuff pops up? How many rants have your name tied to them that may be misconstrued in the future for your kids to deal with? Don’t forget, future employers will be Googling them and can conduct a comprehensive family background check … sins of the father (and mother) and all that …

In his piece for the New Scientist, Teaching the Net to Forget, Sumit Paul-Choudhury states,

“But for those of us who are living more of our lives online, those stakes are getting higher and higher. If we want greater control over our online legacies, we will need web publishing technology that comes with forgetfulness as standard – to start writing with pencils, not pens.”

To that I whole-heartedly agree. For the first time in human history we have a chance at a comprehensive form of immortality, and I for one am concerned about the ongoing implications. To that end, I have been systematically deleting my Facebook legacy, and hiding the few things I believe should be preserved, either for my own personal use or that I feel offers something important to those I care about. My Facebook will be scrubbed once a month so my legacy isn’t preserved through others’ profiles. As always, my personal information will be locked down and there will be no pictures of myself or my family posted. Why? Because my privacy and that of my children is and should always be paramount to the perpetually changing face of our digital lives.

P.S. Google’s Privacy Policy is changing. Do yourselves a favour and read between the lines when you read it. Especially this part. I also love the irony of the US government voicing privacy concerns at Google. You be the judge.