Safe Blogging

[mdlbear]

From docbug_feed and the EFF mailing list, here's an article on How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) -- by which they really mean "How to Blog Anonymously".

I take a rather different approach, and simply assume that anything I put on a website is eventually going to become public, and that everything I write can pretty easily be traced back to me, so I may as well be open about it. Even if I were to set up a blog on invisiblog.com (and how do you know I haven't?), I might carelessly let something slip, or be betrayed by a turn of phrase or a reference to a secret only a handful of people know, or a minor fact that limits the possibilities. (Just as an example, I might mention the fact that the house I grew up in in Connecticut was torn down to make way for a freeway interchange.)

So I rarely use friends locking here on LJ, and don't hide the fact that the Mandelbear is really Steve Savitzky. Anyone who's sufficiently interested can hit Google and find out that I was using that handle on alt.callahans more than a dozen years ago. I try hard to be polite and respectful in what I write (not always successfully), and simply don't mention certain things. I don't go out of my way to mention where I work, but anyone interested can find it out pretty quickly, so I don't worry too much if something slips, and I'm careful not to mention any trade secrets, or indeed anything that I wouldn't casually mention to somebody at a trade show. Even if they don't work for a competitor now, they might in the future.

If I were starting now, in a post-9/11 world, living in a country that's in grave danger of becoming a right-wing theocracy, I might be more careful. The net's not as safe as it once was. But for me, the open road is probably the only one left, so I might as well stay open and make the best of it.

Comments

[mdlbear]

I'd probably have to go a bit farther, since three or four (depending on how you count) of my coworkers are on LJ and my friends' list. Luckily I'm enjoying my job at present.

I do use friends locking to talk about financial and relationship matters that I don't want to be widely known, but one must always assume that things will leak.

[mithriltabby]

If I had any coworkers on my friends list, I’d have to create a custom friends group to exclude them when complaining about work. And I think assuming things can get out is a good practice: I wouldn’t put secure data on LJ at all, no matter how much locking is available.