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Social media plans: a beginning.

I've been thinking about how to handle email, chat, and social media accounts. With some help, I've come to realize a few things:

  1. My immediate concerns about being searched at the border are unlikely. US citizens are not yet being searched, and I've paid extra (it's the American way!) to be pre-sorted into the "boring pile".
  2. If my information is compromised, I'm in very little danger. My concern is almost exclusively for friends who have confided in me. I don't want THEIR information compromised.
  3. It's impossible to know who has old data about me. I'm a little bit concerned about history and my own bad memory. If you claimed that you had hard evidence that I said something stupid ten or twenty years ago or exchanged messages with a criminal, I probably wouldn't argue. After that much time, who knows? Plus, there have been a lot of security compromises and mergers and policy changes.
  4. Some of my "online presence" may be good for me. An employer who searches for me online is likely to find that I've been interested in my current field and participating in discussions about it for many years. 
  5. I do not want to hide or back away from political discussions for a few different reasons. Among them, If my facts are wrong, I want to be corrected. If my facts are right, I want it to be clear that real people believe those things -- I'm not just an anonymous troll or part of a fringe group.
  6. I'm reluctant to use multiple accounts on the same service. It's too easy to post from the wrong account.
While I haven't come up with a comprehensive plan, I've come up with a general direction.
  1. Accounts with a lot of history need to be treated carefully. It's hard to easily review their contents, so I should assume the worst case: that these accounts contain information that could hurt me and others if released. These accounts should have the best possible security settings (including 2-factor-authentication), and I need to be extremely careful about connecting these accounts with anything else.
  2. I need to offer friends an easy, secure way to reach me. That contact method should include automatic deletion of old messages. This way, any secret confessions will automatically disappear.
  3. For social media, services that delete old messages could be useful. Since most social media sites don't include this feature, this may require the use of third party "post monitoring" services. Fortunately, those are incredibly common.
  4. If I'm going to engage in social media groups or discussions that I don't want to tie to "my permanent record", I should consider doing so from a completely separate "sock puppet" account that doesn't use my real name or existing contact information. Doing that properly is quite a bit of hassle. I really need to think about whether it's worth it.
My short term plans are pretty boring:
  1. Weed out old posts on social media. Look for ways to do this automatically in the future.
  2. Think about why I'm using every service that I use. Is it worth keeping an account there?
  3. Some of the older services are useful as an archive, particularly Google. I'll probably go back to using G+ to store news articles that may prove useful for future discussions.
  4. Look at ways to ensure secure disappearing chat and email. There are a bunch of "almost but not quite" services out there. I need to see if I can get one of them into a usable state.
Longer term? More research is required.

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