Managing Your Digital Identity
I don’t know why but a couple of years ago I accepted a huge rush of Facebook friend request from my old school friends. Many of them I had never even seen for over twenty five years, and worst I didn’t even like many of them. But the social networking site works like that drawing you in and ‘connecting you’ even when you don’t really want to.
Of course it’s interesting seeing how people are getting on, although I strongly believe that the better your life looks on Facebook the worse it is in reality. I mean who goes to a fabulous party, stands in the middle and starts posting the fact up to your Facebook status page. I mean I look at Facebook at work when I’m bored shitless, certainly not in the middle of some wild party!
It made me think how much of these updates are true, after all what better way to piss off all the people you didn’t like at school than by posting what a fantastic life you have. Unfortunately although my life is pretty ok – job, house, wife and children etc – it’s not going to inspire mad jealousy. But who says it has to be true, armed with a bit of spare time, a few dollars and a flexible sense of the truth you could just make it all up.
So how about some hot chick interacting with you on your Facebook wall to start?
Don’t know any ? No problem if you got $5, get yourself over to Fiverr.com and choose one. There are a host of beauties who will pretend to be your wife/lover/girlfriend online for a week for $5.
Here’s one I chose, she’s rather nice and I’m sure my old school friends will be impressed to see her. But don’t worry if she’s not suitable there are tons of others there, in fact you could spend $20 and have a few fighting over you all on your Facebook wall ! I was playing around with my proxy français, before and perhaps another young beauty flirting with me from Paris might add a little more glamour too! Don’t worry ladies, there are plenty of blokes on there as well.
Ok so it’s just a bit of fun, but there is a serious side especially with Governments around the world planning on harvesting this data (usually justified as part of some Anti-Terrorist investigation). This digital identity is growing for all of us – every time we do anything online – pay our bills, arrange car insurance or pay a young lady from Portugal to pretend to be our Facebook girlfriend. It’s logged and recorded and potentially anyone could get access to this sort of information.
So be careful what you do online, it’s not just the obvious issues like posting up your location all the time and notifying every burglar that your house is empty. There are bigger, more intrusive games being played and if anyone believes that the authorities can be trusted with this level of information then I suggest checking how the West Yorkshire Police behaved after the Hillsborough disaster.