I Need Some PRIVACY! - Passport Diaries

Privacy settings: how public is too public?

This is a subject I’ve been considering most of the time I’ve blogged. As a newspaper reporter, everything I wrote was public, as were my wherabouts—I was at the newspaper office every day. I had a work phone number to received compliments, questions, and angry rants, plus my work email was listed at the bottom of everything I wrote.

So when I started blogging at Mari’s Passport Diaries, I wasn’t very concerned about privacy settings. So what if someone could tell I lived in Jacksonville, Florida? You could also guess that much by reading my Bloomberg News byline or searching my name on whitepages.com.

In Japan I learned a lot about opperation security, or opsec, since we were forward deployed. Spouses with too much specific personal information got their pilots grilled by the squadron’s front office. “My husband will be deployed for three months on the whatever ship!”, “Here’s a picture of our Japanese house!” and any info on the ships’ deployment schdeules could earn a lecture. For the record: I never got in trouble! I was appropriately vague!

But I’m also a natural over-sharer. And now that I have kids, and mainly only blog about them, I wonder more and more: how much info is too much?

I read that 15 of the 100 names on the ISIS hit list were in our area, and one of the Americans trying to get overseas to join ISIS was arrested here, too. That makes me wonder how to best protect our kids. Am I protecting them electronically? Anyone who spends 10 minutes on our street at 5pm could get a good idea of the military families from the uniforms and haircuts that go marching inside. But what is just being foolish? Is it foolish to have a Navy pride sign on our porch? Should I take it down? For that matter, does the huge, waving, US flag make draw extra attention to our house? Just a little more scrutiny would soon drag up clues to our affiliations.

So there’s the extreme end of the question: would removing our US flag make my family safer? Possibly. And you know what I say to that? F you, danger! I’m not taking down my flag. Chris deploys so we can hang that flag in peace.

But in the non-extreme, online question, I still wonder. My blog is completely public. Should I enable settings that make it not turn up in a search engine, so it can only be viewed if I post a link to facebook or send it via email/text? Should I super lock it down—invite only, sign-in required—when Chris is gone, JUST IN CASE?

Here is a creepy story that happened to me in Japan. I had spent the afternoon at a Kamakura festival about 45 minutes away. I was hurrying home to grab my books and drive to an English class I taught at a Japanese engineering compay. As I walked from the train station to my house, a truck driving down the street next to me pulled into a side street and cut me off. The driver—a Middle Eastern man—leaned out his window. “You were in Kamakura today, yes?” I froze, totally surprised and unprepared. I kind of nodded, and would have kept walking except he was blocking my route. With his truck. It was the middle of the afternoon, but no one else was around.

My thought was, “End this conversation and get home without being followed, just in case. Also so I’m not late to class.”

“You teach English? I want my kids to teach English!” he said, asking for my information. I should have said I didn’t teach English, but I was surprised and…you know…on my way to teach English, and I just wanted him to drive away. Having a random stranger ask for English lessons in Japan is not unusual at all, but this situation was weird. So I handed him my business card (it’s Japan—everyone has business cards). And he drove off. Success. I watched him drive away, then took a roundabout way home through side streets.

When I got to class about an hour later, I checked my phone and saw the guy had called like four times. By the time the hour-long class was over, he’d called nearly thirty times. My phone buzzed the whole way home, where I told Chris what was going on. The phone buzzed again as I was telling him, so Chris answered and told the guy never to call again. He didn’t. So that was awkward and made me feel stupid, and freaked me out for awhile, but ended OK.

But I’d like to avoid anything like that happening again, especially while Chris is gone. ESPECIALLY with babies.

I don’t put tons of pictures of my kids on facebook because I want them to have some control of their online images when they get older. I put lots on my blog, but it’s easy to adjust access to the blog, so having everything in one place keeps it manageable. Unless some random creeper saves every picture and maps out our boring routines in his dimly lit backyard shed. I don’t put identifiable pictures of our house online anywhere, but anyone who reads the community newsletter could pretty easily figure out where I live. Do terrorists read the community newsletter? That was a little joke. Hopefully.

Am I doing enough to keep my kids safe in this weird world between online info and real-life threats? Where’s the balance? What are your thoughts on what you share and how? What’s too public? What’s too private?

Back in the day, anyone could find out your address by looking in the phone book or calling information. So what’s the new standard for today? What’s safe? What do YOU do?

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