Exposure

I’m scrolling through tracks on my iPod when a Britney Spears song comes up and I skip it. Not because the guy next to me on the train would judge me—though he might—but because I’m terrified it’s being scrobbled somewhere, feeding into some invisible profile of me that exists on Last.fm, a permanent record of every musical failure I’ve ever pretended to like.

This is what Web 2.0 paranoia feels like. Every photo you upload, every link you share, every song you half-listen to at midnight—it’s all being collected, indexed, connected. There’s no privacy left, just varying degrees of exposure. Sometimes when I’m thinking through something I want to remember, I actually find myself reaching for the browser cache button, as if my own thoughts might escape into the internet if I don’t pin them down first.

Last week I had a nightmare. I was checking Technorati to see who’d linked to me, and there it was: my name at the top of some WTF? list. I clicked through and saw my Flickr account had been hacked. Nude photos of me, of people I know, scattered across the web. The kind of nightmare that wakes you up sweating, the kind where everyone you know has seen something you never meant to show them. My friends in the dream were furious. Then I woke up.

The dream stuck with me because part of me knows it could happen. We put so much of ourselves online, and we have almost no control over what happens to it. At some point someone’s going to get careless, or unlucky. Maybe the smart move is to delete everything now while we still can, kill every account, stop feeding the machine before it turns on us.

But that’s not going to happen. I’m still blogging. I’m still uploading photos to Flickr, still scrobbling every album, still leaving this trail of myself all over the internet. I guess I’m just an exhibitionist—too vain or too lonely to keep anything private. The exposure is the point. I want to be seen, and I’m willing to take the risk.

So go ahead and check what I’m listening to. See if Britney Spears ever shows up on my Last.fm. And don’t bother trying to hack my Flickr for the nudes—there aren’t any. Probably.