In this day and age we can’t really be too cautious of protecting ourselves. Do you know this online game called GeoGuessr? It’s basically a game that starts you off with a Google street view, and you have to point on the map where it is. It scores you by the distance from the place you picked to the actual place in the world.
I sometimes see clips of people who do this (sometimes competitively, sometimes for fun) and it’s just insane how people are able to get the location so accurately. These people have street sign designs, writing systems of the world, road convention, local fauna/flora, and so many more things just memorized.
This means whatever photos of you you post online has the potential to be GeoGuessr’ed. Of course the streamers who do professionally have guidelines about how they can only do it with public photos instead of private photos and such, but who knows if somebody is really great at it but is just using it for private money?
So how do you keep yourself safe, especially if you’re wanting to be a content creator or an online business coach?
We have to talk about some privileges first. I’m an Asian guy living in the United States. Based on some research I’ve read, Asian males are perceived to be the least masculine and Asian females are perceived to be the most feminine. This means when you’re an Asian female online, people who are attracted to reacting a certain way to feminine content will likely do so.
Just because I post a lot of myself online with my face on it, doesn’t mean you should do it as well. Then what’s the right amount of yourself to put on the internet? Of course, the answer is “you decide”, but how do you decide about these things?
Well, I think securing yourself is best worked incrementally from the MOST secure to potentially less instead of the other way around. If you’re a bodhisattva and you have the mentality of “I can learn from every life experience”, then you can do whatever I guess; but in general I think it is so much better to be safe than sorry.
This can be learned from car insurance, theft, being let go from a job, and so on; it’s so much better to have preemptively worked on security in case something happens. But of course, we can’t spend our entire life worrying about something bad that can happen, so my primary point is this: Practice thriving in the comfort of safety first.
When you’re a kid playing in the pool of your very own house, you have to thrive in it. This is like a social contract and that’s why pedophiles tend to be greatly hated: they make children feel unsafe in the comfort of their own zones.
Just like this, when you’re starting out online it’s important to practice thriving first in the most maximum privacy. What is it like to post, in terms of the physical feeling of pressing the buttons and typing things? How would it feel to have more people see this? These are questions you can answer yourself in the comfort of your own private zone.
Then you incrementally add more visibility, only if you want to. Maybe start following your IRL friends and invite them to your private account. Then try opening up the account. Then try adding hashtags. Then try posting a lot more. These are things you can do in incremental order while prioritizing the point of it all: YOU thriving. If you’re not having fun, if you’re not sharing the things you want to express, the whole thing is pointless.
In terms of internal experiences, this is my recommendation. But we also need to do some practical safeguarding of personal information. Here are some things I recommend for anyone online:
- Search yourself online, with incognito on/off. Are you finding something that shouldn’t be public to the entire world? Remove it yourself or file a data deletion request from search engines so your personal information is not revealed.
- Take a look at your public profile and see if you have any identifying information about your home or general trajectory of movement within your city. Consider removing those content.
- Search for your address, whether it be home or studio or work; see if the results should be available for everyone on the internet.
- Hide your domain registration information from WHOIS, so people can’t backtrace from your domain.
- Certain services will provide a PRIVATE blocked word list. This means when somebody tries to spread identifying information about you, it will be shadowbanned and nobody else will be able to see it.
Familiarize yourself with all the privacy tools your services provide. For your information here are some resources:
Stay safe online! And as a final parting word, take this advice from my wife: “Don’t post photos outside when you’re actually there; always post with delay”.