Although your average, everyday person might not think of themselves as having a “personal brand” or even knowing what that term means, they usually do understand one thing: the results that come up when someone searches for their name and the fact that these results essentially represent who they are to other people, especially people who might not know them personally. And since Google has pretty much cornered the market on search, it has also cornered the market on all of our personal brands.
When I took Amy Bruckman’s Design of Online Communities class at Georgia Tech (waaay back in Fall 2000), we discussed privacy issues at length. She noted that the problem wasn’t about the information that a single company had about you. The problem arose when two companies got together and were able to relate what each knew about you to build a more complete picture - a picture that you might not want them to have. Somewhat similar to what I wrote about in “When Worlds Collide,” this ability to have your Facebook account linked to your Yelp reviews, and your Flickr photos and your LinkedIn profile, is convenient to some people and scary to some others.
But screw that. At least on Facebook I have some control over what’s displayed about me. But with Google, that control is nowhere to be found. A Google search for “sarahcpr” yields way more stuff about me than any one person should ever know - from StumbleUpon reviews to StyleHive to the ridiculous online karaoke videos I made when I was really bored over winter break. Most of these sites give you very little control over the display of your content via search - it’s not in their best interest to hide this content (less pageviews for them) and even if I deleted it, it would be in Google’s cache for who knows how long. (Seriously though, does anyone know how long?)
Even deleting content is starting to prove impossible. As I mentioned in The Microblogging Mess, if I post something to Brightkite but I want to delete it, I can delete it there, but then I have to delete it from Twitter, and then I have to navigate to FriendFeed and delete it from there. But guess what? Summize doesn’t let me delete it at all (and it gets to Summize from Twitter FAST), so it’s there for everyone to see anyway.
On the one hand, I like the stance of Gary Vaynerchuck, who says that all of this transparency means that people have to be more honest and that the good ones will shine through and the asshats will be exposed.
(In fact, this is pretty much the opinion I took in Amy Bruckman’s class - I was ridiculed for it though) (Well I guess I said it less eloquently - I think I said something like “People are going to find stuff out about you no matter what you do, so you should just deal with it.”)
On the other hand though…is Google going to give us control over these search results? Can they turn these results into an uber-profile that I can then tweak to show and hide the pieces of content I want exposed about me? Or am I just going to have to start being more careful about what I say?
June 26th, 2008 at 11:16 am
The asshats shall be exposed!
It’s an interesting problem, but I’m not sure it’s Google’s to solve. Your information might live on a page that also contains information about me. Google can’t just remove the page entirely from their index or they would also be deleting me. Eventually, I think the sites that host our content (like Twitter) and transmit it to other sites (like Summize) will offer better tools for us to control the flow of data. Google does offer site owners an option to remove pages from the index & cache, but I think it’s the sites that host the data that will need to tell them what to remove. If enough sites adopted better controls over privacy, consumers will come to expect them and the sites that don’t offer them won’t be used. That’s going to take time though, I imagine.
I also agree that over time, people will simply become more comfortable with the fact that their lives are becoming more public - they’ll deal with it.
Ok, I’m off to make a jackass of myself on some web 2.0 site. Later.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
You’re probably right - it’s up to the site owners. We had people writing to us pretty frequently at PV - saying that they had deleted their account, but that the content they created and their profiles could still be found through Google. But even if we deleted all of their content, it was still cached on Google and there wasn’t much we could do about it.
And you’re right - it will take time for people to demand better tools to control if and how what they create can be found through other sites. For example, I think many of the tweens online right now might freak out in a few years when they’re applying to jobs or college and realize that their ranty comments, whacky photos or embarrassing videos are all out there for anyone to see.