On digital privacy and, well, privacy
It's always interesting for me to find out why people get into making cultivating their own digital gardens and/or purging themselves from social media. Maybe they work in tech and have the know-how to both make a site and understand the ins and outs of data sharing and policy. Maybe they were raised in a country that values privacy. Or whatever other reasons there may be.
I am certainly no web developer, being thrown into coding in an introductory bioinformatics course in my second year of college. For what it's worth, I still don't like R. But I enjoy coding, and it has played some role in my graduate work. I liked making my own static site a couple years ago.
As I was raised in the US, digital privacy was never on my radar. The Internet was cool, and being on social media was even cooler. I wasn't allowed to have a Facebook in middle school, but I did anyway. My parents found out and eventually let me keep it.
So, like many others here and in similar spaces, I wasn't always into the indie web and/or digital privacy. I still recall scrolling endlessly on Twitter and managing my three Instagram accounts (because everyone needs a "normal" profile, an alternate persona, and a finsta). It was only five years ago that I experimented with digital minimalism (thanks, Cal Newport) in an effort to boost my productivity as a first-year graduate student and feel more in control of my time.
Soon enough, I deleted my social media accounts. Almost exactly five years ago at the time of writing this post. I got back into reading for pleasure, a hobby I abandoned in high school. At the risk of sounding elitist, I to this day still can't believe I wasted years on Twitter and Instagram.
Outside of the time management aspect, digital privacy intrigued me. Nowadays it's nothing novel to acknowledge how much data Meta and the like harvest from you. And surely this was one of the other reasons that compelled me to disappear from social media platforms.
I was committed from the start, replacing if not deleting many services that prey upon my personal data. Almost immediately I was watching Invidious instead of YouTube, listening to AntennaPod instead of Stitcher. Signal became my messaging app of choice. I even ditched my phone's native OS for CalyxOS. I listened to Edward Snowden's autobiography. I couldn't get enough of Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I owe a reread.
And as a cherry on top, I received several hundred dollars from one of Facebook's privacy class action settlements.
But I'm not sure the data harvesting aspect is the only or even the main reason I became privacy-conscious.
I didn't think my second blog post would include this story, but here it goes:
Since my high school days, my mom, unlike my father, was chronically online. Her (raunchy) Twitter account garnered tens of thousands of followers, primarily strange Republican men.
I made nothing of this behavior even if I thought it was a bit gross. Until some of my high school friends told me that my mom was lurking on Instagram too, viewing their Instagram stories although she never followed them. Then it happened to me. I didn't confront her, but I thought it was a little strange.
My disdain for this grew during college. Despite the physical and emotional distance between us, I became a common feature on her Twitter account, without my consent. She wrote about me in a way that was suspicious and overly possessive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this sometimes turned into text messages urging me to not join certain events, like some random protest I never expressed interest in attending anyway. She liked making me feel bad for no reason.
I knew she was looking at what I posted online. Though I had nothing to hide — all I did was study, take photos for my university's newspaper, and go to a show once in a while — and didn't share my every thought with the World Wide Web, I grew very, very uneasy.
Until I turned the tables.
The dynamic between my parents was especially odd when they visited me at my college graduation ceremony. Continuing to monitor the situation, I noted increased communication between my mom and one of her Twitter followers. Coincidentally, she insisted on coming to see me during a particular week in my new city, where I would begin my graduate studies. It was unlike her to not ask first if the dates were compatible with my schedule.
Long story short, my intuition was correct: though my mom was indeed coming to visit me unsolicited when I had no time to entertain her, it was more so to see some man she had been lusting over online. He lived only a few hours away from me.
I had evidence, and I couldn't keep it to myself for long. On the verge of tears outside of the university library, I called my dad and told him what I saw. I was not close with either of my parents, yet I felt like I owed it to him. He could barely write a text message on his phone, so how else could he have found out?
It almost goes without saying that my parents got divorced. And to be honest, they should have split a long time ago.
Regardless of the outcome, this feeling of both being spied on and being the spy left me no choice but to leave no online trace for my parents to find. So, Twitter and Instagram had to go.
I have no regrets. At least I now better understand what privacy means to me.
Today, I am a privacy-aware Internet user who makes some sacrifices. Admittedly, I still use Spotify and Reddit. I am a member of two Discord channels that hold sentimental value for me, even if I rarely post in them. Instead of jeopardizing opportunities to connect, I sometimes use Telegram instead of Signal. I can't inconvenience others too much.
On the other hand, I'm trying to more actively participate in the IndieWeb, and journaling here will play a key role in that. I believe the value in quitting social media lies not only in becoming more present offline but also realizing that there is a whole lot more to the Internet outside of the metaverse that many may never discover.
Maybe this post reeks of being afraid of what my parents thought of me when I was growing up. But even though I moved out of my childhood home over nine years ago and don't really communicate with my parents anymore, I'm still glad my thoughts (and my Bearblog) are safe from them.