The most-emailed NYTimes story today is about online profiles and privacy: “How Privacy Vanishes Online”. This article highlights the futility in adjusting privacy controls:

In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

Something we’ve been thinking about lately are the people you actually forgot you friended. You may have had a brief interaction with them which was meaningful in the moment, so led to immediate friending, following or exchange of contact information. But as time and space increased, you forget the specifics of the interaction and when you look at the person’s name it doesn’t trigger a memory for you. Have you looked at your friend lists lately and can you remember who everyone is? What are you revealing about yourself to those people? Do you mind sharing your life with non-familiar strangers? On the flip side, are you keeping up with the lives of any total strangers just because they are on one of your friend lists? (If you can’t relate at all to these issues, maybe you have a better social memory than I do? Or you are more selective in your friending from the start?)

I find this to be a particular problem for me on LinkedIn because I meet people at professional conferences and then never see them again. Another aspect of this is if the stranger is an infrequent posters (or limits the visibility of their posts), then there is nothing to remind me that I’m following them. They are silent wallflowers that may or may not be observing my posts.

Let’s say you go through the effort to pick out these strangers on your friend list. Then there is the whole issue of not wanting to offend these people by de-friending them. What if this total stranger remembers your meeting and hopes to reconnect again? What if they have been following your updates and when you defriend them are painfully aware you have removed them? Or what if they have no idea who you are either, and is just too polite to de-friend you? Awkward!!