Your facebook, linkedin accounts, and all the other social media platforms with which you interact are not home, they are places you visit, and perhaps rent a space to leave something behind for storage and easier access and use. They can be taken away, moved, or you can be banned, excluded, or diminished without being able to do anything about it.
Just like renting a house, you have some rights, but ultimately, you do not own it, and the ones who do hold all the cards. When you own the house you live in, you can do pretty much anything you like. You own it, and it cannot be taken away.
When you think about your digital life with this simple thought in mind, it should change the way you behave.
You know the old story, rental cars go really fast in reverse, they can be abused by those renting them, simply because they do not own them, and are not responsible for the damage done beyond the superficial. That is also true for rented space on the digital platforms others own. Your content, presence and connections can be misused, abused and lent to others without your knowledge or consent. Just ask the B class celebs who recently have had their nude pictures shared from the Apple servers.
Should, have kept their nude antics at home.
Anything you want to own that is held on a public platform, your mailing lists and personal photos for example, must be assumed to be at some point, compromised. If you do not want the risk of it being on the front page of the paper one day, keep it at private, at home.
At the very least, back them up onto something you own, leaving it where it is on a rented or worse, free platform, anything can happen.
For business, it comes back to the notion of owned, earned and paid media. Each has its place, and can be complementary as well as synergistic, but make sure you get the mix right, and that you understand the implications.
As a result of the increasingly powerful grip the social platforms have on the reach you can generate organically, driven by their business model. It is therefore ESSENTIAL that you have your own digital real estatre.In other words, a website hosted on your URL, which actd as yur home base. .
Ha ha. I love your headline… Attention grabbing to say the least. And you have a very valid point> Always have at least one safe “at home” backup. I personally like to download the mysqls, file sets, email list export CSVs etc to my laptop. My laptop is backed up every 1 hour, and on top of that I have a out of house backup running every day. Some data is just too valuable to be left for others to guard.
Very good advice. My own practices leave a bit to be desired, as I am not as assiduous as you about backup, it is still a manual process. Besides, seeing me nude would only lead to a surge in people seeking therapy.
I don’t think I have one single picture of me nude. Not my coin.:-)
But I do have valuables I don’t want others to get hold of 😉 And your blog post is a great awakening in that area.
I saw a comment on the net a week or so back, regarding the many celebrities that had lost their nude privacy with the iCloud hackings. The comment said: “How come we don’t ever see a nude photo of Emma Watson? – That’s because she is smart enough to never shoot any.”
keep your valuables close.
Such a display would seriously impact the psychology of way too many sensitive readers!
Is the author prepared to display his birthday suit?