平生不做虧心事，半夜敲門不吃驚: your personal internet footprint

OK at first I was a bit dismissive of this question but I thought I'd answer it anyway by looking at the bigger issue, the wider picture rather than just dealing with the question in isolation. My reader 'Luck of Fire' wanted to know:

Luck of Fire 9 February 2014 07:49

How did you deal with people digging your life up, "exposing", "CSI-ing" and harassing you? I think I am going to be "exposed" soon. I wish to learn how you cope with it. Thanks.

Social media has become a big part of our modern life.

Firstly, a disclaimer: I know nothing about Luck of Fire apart from the fact that she is a young Singaporean student who reads my blog.  That's all the information I have from her Blogger profile - apart from that, she has revealed nothing else in her comments on my blog so that's all I know about her.

Now in this internet age, we will all have some kind of internet footprint, it won't be hard to find our names somewhere on the internet particularly once you start working. Any marketing manager will have his/her name all over the company's marketing materials under the section, "for more information, please contact (name) at (phone number) or (email address)." Besides, even if you are still a student, most schools/polytechnics/universities will have websites which carries news about the various activities students are involved in - so it is quite normal for students to have an internet footprint even whilst at school. This is 2014, not 1985.

What is your internet footprint?

As working adults in the internet age, we need to have a good internet footprint in order to promote ourselves. Most working adults will now have a Linkedin profile (though some have a very basic profile - others put their life stories there), heck, even students have Linkedin profiles these days. Likewise, many of us also use all manners of social media from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to Pintrest to Blogger - it is because we enjoy this kind of interaction and it is a great way to use the internet to keep in touch with one's friends.

By the way, I am on Twitter as well, if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @GymnastAlex - though I don't tweet much, as you can tell, I can't say what I want to say in 140 characters or less. I'm too long winded for Twitter. I usually do these quick status updates via Facebook instead for my friends, so my Twitter followers don't get that many Tweets from me. But if you already follow my blog and vlog, you may as well follow me on Twitter as well.

So here's the thing about social media, allow me to state the obvious: don't say anything offensive that will get you into big trouble. Anton Casey comes to mind of course, but there are so many other idiots who have gotten into trouble over Facebook or Twitter. Social media is not anonymous and you should never imagine that you can get away with sending really offensive messages online just because it is not done in person. This is something many people don't actually realize, take for instance, the number of Chinese-Singaporeans who spout racist and xenophobic statements on Facebook - now imagine if this Chinese-Singaporean applies for a job and the HR manager is of Malay, Indian or Filipino (or even a Chinese-Singaporean who finds racism highly offensive) and decides to google this job applicant, only to find the racist remarks online. What do you think will happen next?

This is hardly a uniquely Singaporean situation - there is a story from China that I came across on the BBC recently when an innocent man in Xinjiang, China became a victim of an internet hate campaign. Taxi driver Yin Feng in the city of Urumuqi became a hate figure and the victim of a "human flesh search engine" campaign after he was wrongly identified as the taxi driver who spat on an elderly homeless person. It was particularly frightening for Yin Feng as all these internet vigilantes jumped to the wrong conclusion based on a partial match to his taxi's license plate number but they were not prepared to be rational - he had become a scapegoat for them to vent their anger and hatred. 

When I got the unwanted attention of the Singaporean media last year, a lot of Singaporeans actually started looking me up through google and these were the following things they dug up:

• My blog, which you are reading now. 
• My Youtube channel, where I host my vlog 
• My Linkedin profile - which had a lot of hits overnight
• Links to other work related websites which I have done over the years
• Other things I have said on other forms of social media over the years

Now out of those four items above, I control 4 out of 5 items - it is only the work stuff that I don't have direct control over. If people want to read my blog (5.5 million page views so far) and hear what I have to say for myself, I am only too happy to get more readers! Likewise for my Youtube channel, I've had 805,000 hits on my Youtube channel so far and I want to get over a million hits this year. And if they were to find my Linkedin profile - ooh they are going to read a boastful listing of my (rather long) list of achievements, what are they going to do, accuse me of being arrogant on Linkedin by listing every single award and scholarship I have ever won over the years? So when these people on the forums claimed to have 'CSI-ed' my blog and vlog, I wanted to laugh at them because I use Google Adsense on both my blog and Youtube channel - so the more hits I get, the more money I make and these people were making money for me. So whilst these people thought they were invading my privacy, they didn't realize that  I actually wanted them all to come read my blog and watch my Youtube and make me lots of money in the process. Oh the irony. 

I make money from social media, I like people to talk about my blog and vlog. 

Here's the punchline: you need to stake your claim to your personal internet footprint, you need to make sure that when people google your name, what they will find is something that you have put up on the internet that says, "this is who I am, this is me, this is what I have to say for myself." Otherwise, if you do not claim your own personal internet footprint, then you leave it to others to populate the internet with what they have to say about you (which you have no control over). Now that's a scary thought, I'd rather people find my blog, my Youtube channel or my Linkedin profile and see what I have to say about myself - at least I control what people read/see about me there. 

I have an ex-colleague who I had a lot of difficulty tracking down - Yvonne and I used to be such good friends at work in the period 2005 to 2007, then she returned to Australia and despite the fact that we exchanged a few emails, she effectively disappeared offline altogether. I thought it was impossible for someone to do that in this day and age, in a country like Australia. It turns out that she had a baby and between holding down a full time job and having to care for her young son, she has barely enough time to sleep at night, never mind social media - yet somehow, I managed to track her down recently via her company's website in Melbourne. So you see, even someone like my ex-colleague Yvonne does have an internet footprint even if she has completely given up on social media.

Yvonne disappeared from social media but still had an internet footprint.

As for Luck of Fire, okay, she didn't give me much details but it seems that she has possibly offended someone who wants to seek revenge by exposing her personal details online - perhaps her Facebook page, the details of the school she attends, maybe even her phone number or address. But think about it - if someone invaded her privacy by revealing such details online, how would you react? For example, if you saw the details of this person you didn't know, what would your first reaction be? My first reaction would be to wonder why her details were revealed like that and what triggered this - did she offend somebody? Why did this person choose to get back at her in this manner? Otherwise, why would I be interested in her personal details? Is it interesting for any reason at all?

In the case of Anton Casey, Yin Feng the taxi driver in Urumuqi, Zheng Huiting, Sun Ho and Kong Hee, the infamous Alvivi couple or the Encore eServices assault case, all of the individuals involved were accused of something that offended the public, that invoked a sense of injustice - which eventually turned them into a target of public anger. Has Luck of Fire done anything at offensive, that will make the public angry with her? Somehow I doubt it - it sounds more like a private quarrel between classmates or friends which is nothing more than a storm in a teacup. Unless Luck of Fire has done or said something terribly offensive - what has she got to be afraid of if people have no reason to take an unhealthy interest in her personal life? Does she have something she needs to hide from he public?

Why would the public take any interest in a private quarrel?

You see, sometimes the public may take interest in someone for a good reason: just this morning, Jenny Jones of Great Britain won the first ever Olympic medal for team GB on snow when she won the bronze medal in the women's slopestyle snowboarding event. Britain has won medals on ice-related events before (figure skating, bobsled, ice hockey, curling etc) but never on skiing or snowboarding event before. Suddenly, people who have never heard of Jenny Jones were googling her and taking interesting in her and she has become a national hero the moment she won that Olympic bronze medal - but the fact remains that she did something interesting which captured the public's attention, the same way Anton Casey did something offensive that captured the public's attention in Singapore.

But note, both Jenny Jones and Anton Casey only generated all this attention and public interest because of the extraordinary nature of what they did - so if Luck of Fire has done nothing more than have a private dispute with a classmate or friend, why would anyone take the slightest bit of interest if nothing interesting happened in the first place? Let me state categorically, unless something really interesting or extraordinary has happened to Luck of Fire, I think I speak for the vast majority of the population when I say I'm too busy watching the Sochi Winter Olympics to take any notice of a petty dispute between friends. Time for a dose of reality please, duh.

As for how I coped when strangers I didn't know started taking an unhealthy, invasive interest in my private life, all I can say is that I am glad I have already left a considerable personal internet footprint over the years so most of the stuff they could find on me was stuff that I had already personally created and crafted: such as my blog, for example. At least they were seeing information that I had chosen to put out into the public and whilst I had no control over the opinions they formed after having seen that information, at least they were mostly forming that opinion based on factually accurate information about me. Remember, there is nothing sophisticated about this 'CSI exercise' or what these so-called 'keyboard warriors' get up to - it is really just them going to google and doing a search for you, nothing more. Hence that is why there is plenty you can do to determine what comes up in a google search when this happens.

We cannot go back to the 1980s, when there was no internet and nobody had a personal internet footprint and lead a totally anonymous life - all we can do is embrace modern technology, act responsibly on social media and not be paranoid about the internet. Luck of Fire actually once told me something like 'be careful what you reveal online, the internet is not your friend' - I actually have a problem with that statement because she is turning the internet into the enemy, she is viewing the internet as the problem - when really, it is our personal conduct that should be examined (ref: Anton Casey). To conclude, allow me to quote a famous Chinese saying, "平生不做虧心事，半夜敲門不吃驚", it translates as 'if you have a clear conscience, you have nothing to fear'.

 "平生不做虧心事，半夜敲門不吃驚"

So Luck of Fire, if your conscience is clear, what have you got to fear? Why are you worried? That's it from me on this issue - as usual, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you for reading.