Sharing Less

Sharing Less

Did you know that sharing less can help you out in dozens of ways? Because there is something to be said for mystery.

It can also be said for a fan dancer and their artfully concealing fans, if you will. For a dark corner where the camera does not go. And where we do not allow others to see.

Perhaps not even our lovers, our mothers, our children and, most assuredly, not our government. Sorry, not sorry.

What is private online any more? What is not? Where should lines be drawn?

Origins

This post is a riff on Learning Not to Share, an article by Rich Barlow in my alumni magazine, Bostonia.

Wait a second, oops! I just told you where I went to college. I had better cover that up, and sweep it out of the way.

Oh no, wait! I just told you it was undergrad. Good thing I did not tell you one of my professors studied under Wittgenstein.

D’oh! I probably just gave away that I majored in Philosophy! Wait, I will come in again.

We Keep on Sharing

It is like this, over and over and over again online. We share. And we share again. And then we overshare. While the above few tidbits probably do not tell you too much about me, there is plenty of additional information out there. There are plenty of minefields.

We can detonate them in all sorts of ways, both intentionally and not so intentionally.

So, I might accidentally drop something whereby someone could steal a password, stalk me, take my identity, burgle my house while I am away, or something along those lines.

In fact, I use oversharing as a means of password stealing in The Invisible Gang.

Digital Nosiness

Stephen Baker, the author of The Numerati, talks about what essentially amounts to digital nosiness. There is far too much information out there, and we are all inviting it in. And we are also giving it out.

And we do so in the name of greater security, or peace of mind. We want to make sure our teenagers are driving safely so we agree to put what is essentially a black box in the car.

And we want to know that our elderly parents are all right. But we are not committed enough to move them home with us, or move to their homes or cities, even briefly. So, we install sensors in their beds to make sure they get out of them every day.

So then, as privacy erodes, we accept more and more of these intrusions until they are no longer seen as intrusive. And a privacy (and shame) tradition that harkens back to biblical times is canned in favor of The Age of TMI.

Stop Volunteering Information

Is it possible to shut the barn door, when the horse has hightailed it for the next county? Sadly, probably not. But this oversharing is nothing new. I well recall, when I was practicing law (uh oh, another identifier!) and prepping witnesses for depositions.

For example, if the opposing counsel asks, “Were you driving?”, the answer is yes, no, or I don’t remember. It is not, yes, and the car is blue. If the lawyer wants to know the color of the car, she will ask you. Never volunteer anything.

Yet, inevitably, people would do just that. They would volunteer all sorts of stuff. The vast majority of it was completely harmless. However, every now and then, it opened up different things, and drew others into question.

Or it got the whole thing onto some wacky tangent and it then became hard to throw a lasso over the proceedings and get them back to the matter at hand.

I well recall a deposition, once, which was going to take maybe 45 minutes took the better part of a week as a witness and opposing counsel kept feeding one another more digressions.

This was even after I repeatedly told the witness to just stick with answering the actual questions and nothing more.

This tactic, by the way, did not, ultimately, harm my client or help the opponent. All it did was make the matter stretch out that much longer. And, I am sure, it nicely increased my opponent counsel’s bill.

But not me. I was on salary. A deposition could take three years and I would not make any extra money. Dang, there I go again, oversharing!

Sharing Less as an Antidote to Hokum

One truly massive advantage to keeping our yaps shut is in the troubling and now ever-present task of avoiding scams. To wit.

Consider the scenario of Innocent Inez and Unsavory Uriah. Maybe he knows a tiny bit about her because her name has ended up on a sucker list. That is, a list compiled by scammers which identifies her as being someone more likely to fall for a scam than other people.

Why do you think scammers will send official-looking letters but the spelling is off? Because they know that the people who will accept that junk as real will be a lot easier to convince to hand over their cash than the people who do not.

So, what if Inez posts two things on Facebook. 1) I am so sorry my Uncle Joe died. I cannot believe he put me in charge of his estate! and 2) I am gonna try and take care of my grandkids.

That is it. Nothing more.

Watch Out, Inez

Uriah now knows she has some degree of control over money (although he does not know how much yet) and she has people in her life she wants to help out. He virtually never needs to know anything else.

He sends her an email that is ostensibly from the local bank, offering help with handling a complicated estate. Then he also sends something purportedly from the local school district, an offer to celebrate grandparents if she shares a few memories.

He uses different personae and email addresses for these two notes. Inez’s answer to the bank email is she would love some help as it is so hard. And her answer to the school email is that she even attended the same school and helpfully provides her graduation year.

Uriah has officially died and gone to Scammer Heaven.

Uriah Exploits Inez’s Oversharing

With her graduation year and her alma mater, Uriah has a few vital pieces of data on Inez. He can make an educated guess as to her age and he can tell that either she never left her home town or she left and came home.

As the bank persona, Uriah tells Inez that a lawyer, Sheldon, will be writing to her from a local law firm. But Sheldon will be using a Gmail address because he has to bill outside the usual firm billing. Innocent Inez swallows this ‘explanation’ hook, line, and sinker.

She has no idea that Unsavory Uriah is also Shark Sheldon. And she has just served him an excuse to not use a firm email address on a silver platter.

As the school persona, Uriah asks if Inez has a love story to share from when she was at the school. This is just to get more information. Uriah does not care what her answer is, so long as she gives up another data point.

The Shark Swims

As helpful estate lawyer Sheldon, Uriah gets things like bank account numbers, the death and birth dates of her uncle, and other financial data points. As the school persona, he continues to get social information. To get even more, he invents Loverboy Larry.

This social persona expresses an interest in her grandchildren, including their names (a popular source of password fodder), and tells her she looks too young to be a grandmother or to be in her sixties.

More Ensnaring Hokum

Uriah (or someone like him) could also garner a lot of this data from everything from a tarot reading to faith healing or even an AI trained to gather personal information. The biggest thing that can really help out someone like Inez is if her children or grandchildren intervene.

But they may not realize they need to act until it is too late.

Wiping Away Shame

Still, there is an opposite to this.

Some sharing, particularly in the face of things that have been taboo for too long, seems to be, to me, to be a very good thing.

Take, for example, the physical demands and changes that go along with weight loss.

In the interests of full disclosure, this has been a subject rather near and dear to my heart.

So I put it out there. The fact that stretch marks do not really go away and what post-weight loss plastic surgery is really like. And how, no matter how much you want to convince yourself otherwise, the oatmeal just does not taste one bit like fried chicken.

I think that this kind of oversharing can have a true benefit. Give hope, or at least some amusement and information. And trample away shame until it is well and truly gone.

But there is plenty more out there where that came from, and it is often all too much, and it can be damaging. Give away too much and you are the naked fan dancer, all out of fans. Oops.

How to Strike a Balance by Sharing Less

So my suggestion is: tread lightly, and as wisely as you can. And ask yourself: will this information do more harm than good? Will it hurt me or my family?

So, even if the answer to both questions is no, my advice is: consider it and weigh it anyway. And then you can freely and intelligently decide, one way or the other.

Do this based upon reasoned understanding. And not on expediency, or going along to get along, or trying to be cooler than everyone else in school. Above all, do not sleepwalk and step backward into these kinds of giveaways.

If you are going to toss aside that last fan, at least look your audience in the eye when you do so.