My Internet Footprint

Is it a personal matter or a public one? What I do to contribute to my Internet footprint, such as a newspaper article or a prize-winning essay, or even this blog definitely counts as personal. But when other people start piling on to it, does it still stay personal? If someone picks up something I contributed to the Internet originally and showcases it elsewhere, giving me due credit, then I guess I can't exactly complain, irrespective of whether I think it personal or public, since I put it out in the public domain in the first place.

But how about the fact that there is a sizable number of photographs of me floating about on the Internet that I had nothing to do with except being in them? No, they are not pornographic sort, so it is not that I am embarrassed about them or some such. They are regular photographs, mostly on Facebook, put there by family and friends. I don't even have a bloody profile on that damned website, and yet, it contributes more to my Internet footprint than all my other actions put together.

I don't have to do a thing and yet it grows, entirely on its own. Like it were some monster, fed constantly by people who I am sure I know but whose monster-feeding habits I surely have no clue about. Insofar as possible, I have even told people, who I see inclined towards such monster-feeding activity, specifically to not indulge in it when it comes to my private monster, a request that I consider only fair to make.

I guess the fact that these same people will, in all likelihood, never come to my blog, let alone read this post, is a good indicator of exactly how much these friends and family actually care about how I want my Internet footprint to be. Since they can't control my actions, they will make sure that I can't control their's. And in what I guess they must think to be perfectly harmless actions, they indulge in freewheeling exhibitionism, not only on their behalf, but also on behalf of others who may not exactly be the very exhibitionist kinds.

I think I am now going to ask people to not photograph me at all. But then again, I don't trust them to actually give in to my demand. And in the name of freedom to click, click they shall. And once clicked, it absolutely must be uploaded to Facebook, lest Zuckerberg come by and give them a spanking for having dared to withhold even a single moment of their lousy (and others' not so lousy, in comparison) existences from his software that was essentially created to separate the hot broads in college from the ugly ducks. Not a very privacy oriented thought to start with, was it?

If any of you arseholes are reading this (and you know who you are better than even I), then for fuck's sake, leave me be. And if you give even half a damn about me, then please remove my pictures from a site that I really and deeply wish to be no part of. Of course, knowing your ilk, you probably won't, either in indignation at the thought of your freedom of expression being thus curbed, or from sheer laziness that somehow vanishes in a whiff when it comes time to upload and tag and share those gazillion pictures.

And now that I have that off my chest, I don't care any more.