Clover

I never found a four leaf one, but these were even more unusual.

I have been thinking a lot about privacy lately. It began with the questions in many people's minds when some of our wedding photos, which we posted on Blipfoto as part of a Valentine's Day project, were, unknown to us, posted on another site.

With the advent of reality TV, the internet, and social media, we have the ability to create a public record of our lives. I have always felt that anything I did on the internet was not private. I assumed this was because I grew up in a pre-internet age, but this assumption is always proving itself correct. Even when we are assured that it is secure, how often have we gotten one of those letters from some entity saying that their system was hacked, so sorry, somebody in Russia or Nigeria now has all your personal details. So I wasn't upset about finding my wedding pictures on Bored Panda. (Bored Panda? Really?) What I did find objectionable were some of the snarky comments made about the pictures.

Colin Whitehead, in the New York Times, had another take on the issue. If we document every aspect of our lives online, when we fail at life, we can go back through the record and realize we should have seen it coming. In reality television this is called the "loser edit".  "When life gets the drop on us, we (have left) too many traces of our failures, too much material for a ruthless editor to work with. As if we didn't already have one in our heads…."

There is, he continues, also a "winner's edit" Some people sail through life without having to worry about any of this, but everybody else has to "do it by himself or herself, assembling our edits through a thousand compulsive Facebook tweaks, calibrations of Twitter personas, Instagram posts filtered of all disturbance."

Whitehead concludes, that editing is better than "having no storyline at all….Take the footage you need. Burn the rest." 

Even if you never put anything on the internet, your own mind will do it for you. In other words, privacy is what we make of it and how we chose to control it.