Being open online

My mother told me the other day my brother does not think it is smart of me to have my first name or my picture. But I wonder how much of this is just me being used to the Net? I have been online in some form since my freshman year of high school when I had minor exposure to Usenet in 1992. I really jumped online I think in 1995 when I got a modem and Earthlink. So I have been a part of the Internet community for about a decade at this point. This means I have matured into an adult while participating in a society that is very open and quite happy to share personal information.

Now my brother's job might make him worry more than he would if he was in another line of work. But I have held back some info. Notice I don't reveal my last name, my email address, address, phone number, birthday, etc.

But that is actually almost silly to not share it in an easy fashion. I know for a fact this information can be found online. Beyond there being companies that are willing to provide this information for a fee, we have Google. The search engine is relentless and indexes so much that finding information is not hard. I was able to find my email address, old cell number, and my day of birth (no year, but you could have figured it out easily enough) without any trouble.

Hell, I even ended up finding my archive of old blog posts before I moved over to Blogger (access is not totally straight-forward; if anyone cares to view them let me know and I will tell you how to read about how I used to be since I have archives all the way back to 2001 and that is not even complete). I know I have at least two posts in there that happened within the span of a month that caused both of my parents to call me up and suggest I not be so personal in my posts. do think I have scaled back the level of detail that I put in my posts, in part to make sure I have some semblance of a private life. But also to just cause people to call me to talk. Yes, I do put in statements in my blog that are purposefully vague but juicy in hopes someone will call and want to talk.

Anyway, I think I have finally found a good balance of sharing enough information about myself for people to have an idea of how I am doing and any interesting things I have done in my life without sharing too much personal information or disclosing other's information that they might not want shared.