Is Online Anonymity a Thing of the Past?

After spending the last week in Costa Rica I went online last night to post photos from my trip. I had been down in Central America for a friend’s wedding, and I knew 20 of my closest friends would also want to rehash the week in images. At first I went to push them onto Flickr, but then I wondered whether I wanted images of me vacationing all over the web. So instead I uploaded them to my Snapfish account, which allows me to send a link through email to specific people.

The whole thing made me wonder: Was I being overly private? Are average people putting their personal photos up for the whole world to see? Turns out, they are. After 2 minutes of searching Flickr for other Costa Rica vacationers, I found pics of:

• A group horseback riding to see waterfalls
• Friends soaring on a zip line through the rain forest
• A grandmother showing off her bruise

Have we as online users turned a corner in how we view online privacy? Has the increased sense of community online led to a new level of openness?

I thought back about the different iterations of my friends’ MySpace and Facebook pages. Several started out using avatars or some type of alterego, but just about everyone has now swapped them for real photos. No one seems conerned that their boss could stumble upon their page to peruse their latest rant about how lame work was. And many people’s screen names clearly reflect their real ones. Even my female friends don’t seem concerned about showing their faces.

So maybe people feel comfortable sharing in social networking sites where they pass time chatting with friends. And in professional networks like Webgrrls, people tend to be fine appearing online in pictures from events. But would they be as willing in other online environments, such as e-commerce?

A while ago, I blogged about social shopping sites, and I went back to see if shoppers felt the same freedom to share when they were in a retail environment as opposed to a network of current and future friends. I was surprised to see that not only do people post pics of themselves, but the shopping sites allow visitors to browse reviewers by their customer photos. For example, you can look at the photos of all the reviewers (called “Kaboodlers”) on Kaboodle.com. The site is only in beta, and still it has hundreds of people willing to show their faces.

People seem to forget that this thing is archived and that data we submit to companies is now owned and controlled by them. Building trust between participants in an online community is a great thing. And as a designer of online information spaces, I need to train my brain to rethink the computability level of different user groups online. But as an online user myself, I think I’ll stay a little anonymous in my personal life for now.

Oh, and even though I opted to not share my photo album with the world for now, here’s a peek at one of my days in the Costa Rican rain forest:

Related posts:

1. Social Networks and Online Shopping Collide to Create “Social Shopping”
2. The Web’s Future: Peering into the Crystal Ball
3. Deck the Site With Boughs of Holly