I’ve been think­ing a lot more about online pri­vacy for the last cou­ple of years, so I was already pre­pared for the cur­rent con­tro­versy over Facebook’s change in its Terms of Ser­vice, and it wasn’t much of a shock to me. I’ve never really posted pic­tures there, imported my own blog posts, or posted links to any­thing that wasn’t already pub­lic some­where else, because their Terms of Ser­vice always said they owned it and could do what­ever they wanted with it. Even though they seem to be back­ing off and revert­ing to the pre­vi­ous TOS, I hope every­one real­izes that noth­ing has really changed because they can imple­ment the same thing in the future at the drop of a hat.

One of the biggest ques­tions that should come out of this is do you want Face­book (and other social net­works) to man­age your online iden­tity for you and your chil­dren? Just as you should be tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity to shred your credit card receipts, check­ing on your credit reports, etc. to man­age your “real world” iden­tity, you should also think through how you man­age your online iden­tity, because ignor­ing the prob­lem and just not hav­ing an online iden­tity can actu­ally back­fire on you. Does every­one have to blog? Heck no, but there are smaller steps you can take.

I first started tak­ing my online iden­tity more seri­ously after read­ing an arti­cle titled Say Any­thing in New York mag­a­zine three years ago. I still find it fas­ci­nat­ing, and I’ve come to appre­ci­ate it even more after hav­ing a cou­ple of pri­vacy inci­dents occur in my own life.

The first inci­dent caused me to back­track on pri­vacy and limit access to many of my accounts to just friends and fam­ily, tak­ing a more tra­di­tional approach to the issue. I felt like I needed to shut down open access to my life in order to pre­serve my iden­tity, so I also cut back on the num­ber of peo­ple I friended and became a lot more selec­tive. I became like the father in the New York arti­cle, won­der­ing why I would ever make those things public.

Dur­ing the sec­ond inci­dent, how­ever, it turned out to be very for­tu­nate for me that I already had a well-known iden­tity online. In that respect I’m espe­cially lucky I started early because I don’t have a very unique name, “Jenny Levine,” made worse by the fact that I now share that online name­space with an actress.

Now I com­pletely under­stand the view of the teenager in the arti­cle, that it’s bet­ter to con­trol your own iden­tity than to let some­one else cre­ate one for you. I still keep Face­book sep­a­rate and lim­ited to friends, and I still post most per­sonal pic­tures for friends and fam­ily only, but every­thing else I share is avail­able pub­licly because it helps main­tain my iden­tity online. It also means I don’t have to strug­gle as much with who can see what, and how much, and should I friend them back, and all of the other ques­tions that come with par­tic­i­pat­ing in social networks.

I think the issue of hav­ing some sort of pub­lic, online iden­tity will become even more impor­tant in the future as kids grow up with dig­i­tal dossiers that – in many cases — their par­ents have cre­ated for them since birth. In fact, I think we’re going to see a trend in which savvy, edu­cated par­ents give their chil­dren strange®, unique names so that they can eas­ily reg­is­ter a domain name for them. That way, even a minor pres­ence like a blog or lifestream will always come up as the first result when some­one searches for the kid, either to com­bat false infor­ma­tion or pro­vide a pos­i­tive image (eg, to a poten­tial employer).

As the child grows up, s/he can take over the online pres­ence and pop­u­late it him/herself, but at least it’s already estab­lished so that some­one else can’t fake one. Who knows how long we’ll use domain names, but I think this will be an issue for at least the next decade, what­ever form it takes, and I fully expect to see a rise in iden­tity bullying.

Iris Jas­tram has writ­ten a great post titled Facebook’s Dev­il­ish Con­tract, explain­ing her inter­nal debate over what to do about her pres­ence on social net­works. I par­tic­u­larly love her use of the term the “social time out chair,” which is where you put your­self if you don’t main­tain a pres­ence on these sites.

As she notes, it’s not really an option for many peo­ple to opt out of social net­works alto­gether. Bet­ter to post things to your own site and par­tic­i­pate at a level you’re com­fort­able with, because I can tell you from expe­ri­ence that it could actu­ally hurt your iden­tity and rep­u­ta­tion if your response to these issues is to just ignore them or take your ball and go home. Even if you quit Face­book, you have to be vig­i­lant else­where. On the inter­net, no one knows you’re a dog, but they also don’t know that you’re you, and at this stage of the game, any­one can be you.