I’ve had a growing sense of unease about how I’ve handled my online life over the last several months and to a lesser extent the last year or two. In general it’s felt like it’s spinning out of control. I was already wanting to make changes, then the Cambridge Analyitica news broke.

The general unease was for a few reasons:

1. Every time I opened Facebook I would close the app or go to a different tab within 5 minutes because the algorithm showed me the posts it thought I wanted to see, without realizing that while that is the content I’m most likely to open and share, I can only handle so much without getting frustrated, pissed of, or want to run away from live and hide in the woods.
2. My in real life social life has been heavily tied to Facebook.
3. Most communication for the podcast has been going through Facebook.
4. Google has all of my email, location information, and search history. That’s a lot of data.

We’ve all agreed to having our data harvested as the price for these free services provide and most of us know by now that Facebook and Google are advertising companies and we are the product, not the customers. Despite the fact that a lot of what I do online is on a podcast and by nature public and I’m otherwise a pretty boring person with not much to hide, I do still value privacy. Unfortunately what appears to be of the greatest value is the psychological profiles that these companies can develop based on the data they are gathering to either sell better targeted ads or sell this psychological data to the likes of Cambridge Analyitica for nefarious purposes.

Facebook has done psychological experiments to see how much they can tweak people’s moods and I’m pretty certain that I was a subject of that study. They’ve also set up their permissions system to allow friends of friends to provide consent to harvest one’s data. I personally think they have gone way beyond what any reasonable person consented to and I am seriously rethinking the consent I’ve granted them.

While Google gather’s as much data, I’m pretty confident they are using it in the ways that they say they are: showing personalized advertising. It’s creepy and it’s a bit worrisome, but it’s not as bad as what Facebook has been doing.

Fortunately my wife has been very patient with me as I’ve gone back on forth on how to make sense of all of this and how to make the changes I need to maintain my online sanity, but I think it will be more productive to move these thoughts to this blog, so over the next few weeks or months I’ll be blogging about what I’ve done and what I plan on doing as I restructure my online life.

It’s worth noting at the start that there are some pretty serious limitations to what I can do:

1. Money is tight between a baby, my wife staying home with the baby, and student loans. This precludes most, if not all, of the options to secure my data through self hosting and paid services.
2. My in real life social life is heavily tied to social media and I don’t want to allow paranoia to isolate me.
3. Changes that inhibit my ability to do the podcast are unacceptable. It’s something I like doing and it is our second biggest source of income. Fortunately it is easier to justify spending money if it’s for reasonable business expenses.
4. Considering the topic of the podcast and what I’ve blogged about here, I need to keep my work life separate from my online life and that includes having a personal email address that’s separate from this and the podcast’s domains.