Embracing Creepy

Stalking is just plain creepy.  It just is.  A weird guy who takes an interest in a woman he’s never met, a girl who has no idea he even exists.  Sometimes it starts with “Blog Stalking”, cruising an interesting blog over and over, or visiting a Discussion Forum to read a girl’s posts, hitting refresh as neurotically as clicking a pen.  But, when stalking moves from watching through the blue glow of the monitor to real life watching through the living room window,  it is the cruelty of stalking that strikes me the most.  The silent Watcher has no empathy for his Victim.  He just sits and watches as events and occurrences unfold.  No different than the detached coldness of the Engineer monitoring a Network.

This notion of the emotionally removed Stalker was taking up room in my head when Kevin Kelleher’s blog on the last day of Web 2.0 Summit 2011 was served up on the web page I was reading.  I didn’t see the blog until 5 days later, but it struck a chord nonetheless.

In the world of stalking, it is always the victim who is required to change their behavior, never the stalker.  It is always the victim who is reviewed and analyzed to determine what it was, when it was or how it was she attracted her stalker’s unwanted attention.

Inevitably, Facebook is identified as the culprit.  The victim’s use of Social Networking of any kind is the “problem”.  The very fact that the victim has an email account or dares to use the Internet in any fashion is held up as the excuse du jour for the stalking problem.  As if, in this day and age, it is possible to avoid Social Networking and the Internet.

Furthermore, it is the analysis of the victim and her behavior or habits, never the stalker’s behavior.  It is the victim’s Internet activity that is reviewed, never the stalker.  The only analysis of the stalker inevitably ends with weak vocabulary such as “creepy” or “weird”.

And then I read Kevin Kelleher.

Facebook makes us embrace creepy

http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/10/19/facebook-makes-us-embrace-creepy/

Based on the sentiments of Sean Parker, Mark Pincus and Mark Zuckerburg, everything we are told a stalking victim must do to remain safe will turn them into “the 21st century Luddite buddy who has a weirdly obsessive need to hear news of your life in person, at lunch or whatever, rather than on Facebook”

Accept the fact that there is a creepy stalker cruising your Facebook page and everything you have ever uploaded to any server since 1994.    You aren’t special, you are one of billions of people whose personal information is stored on a server somewhere.

In other words, our lives will be uploaded by, and observed by, and written on some server by, and remembered by some engineer who, at the end of the day, doesn’t really know us, or who we are. Of course, most engineers won’t care who we are. But what if that engineer isn’t someone we trust?

For every 100 honest, hard working, trustworthy Engineers, there is one Sociopathic Engineer.  That one “bad apple”.  While the average 99 Engineers respect the Privacy Laws surrounding personal data, and do their best to preserve the anonymous data they are trusted to oversee, there is that 1 who just can’t help himself.

“Of course, most engineers won’t care who we are. “

It is that 1 Engineer who will inevitably wander out from the Server Closet, eyes squinting and dodging the daylight to go in search of his data subject.  This is where that cruelty comes into play, because to the Stalker, that’s all you are – Data.

Something in your data stream struck him as special.  Something in your bits and bytes rose up and caught his attention.  He has access to information about you that the average person, or Marketing Executive, would have to pay thousands of dollars to obtain.  He has the unique position of being in front of your data 8, 10, even 16 hours at a time, unlike the average person who must make time to get in front of your data stream.  What would take the average person months, even years to collect, he collects in days.

Managing who sees what data about you online is becoming an increasingly impossible task. The first 20 years of the web were about users expressing themselves, deciding what parts of their lives they published online. Increasingly your online identity belongs to a company like Facebook or Google. You either deal with that creepy fact, or you just don’t exist online.

In today’s internet of Social Networks, you must deal with the fact that your personal information is “out there”.  Even with privacy controls to weed out the average garden variety stalker, there is no way to stop the stream of personal data flowing through servers all over the globe.  The alternative is that you simply don’t exist online.  What we don’t have to accept is the 1 Bad Apple Engineer who steps out of the server closet and into your daily, off line, real life.