Online privacy and photographs

Now, I can hardly be said to be concerned about privacy the way I put so much online. I blog, I use facebook, I use twitter, I use Flickr. And all in my real name.

But people who follow me on facebook or twitter may have noticed something odd. A good friend summed it up: I come across like a single guy. I’m a married man with a two-year old son, yet my family hardly ever get a mention. Well, there’s a reason for that: Rachael is just not very comfortable with “our lives” being so open, and she asked me to never mention them on facebook. So I don’t. Well, hardly.

Well, this weekend there’s been another update: I’ve made a change to the privacy settings on our photos. All my online photos are on Flickr, and until now I’ve always had them openly available. After a couple of chats over the weekend, family photos (as opposed to all my random shots) are now marked on Flickr as viewable by “Friends and Family” only. So if you click on the link to my photos you’ll still see plenty there. But none of my son. They are still on Flickr, so if we actually know you and you’d like to be able to see them, you can either sign up for a flickr account, and I’ll mark you as a friend, or ask me to email you a guest pass.

I’d recommend signing up for an account – Flickr is a great service – but if all you want to do is look, then a guest pass will do just fine.

We do still have our family blog over at Which Way’s Up?. There may be some changes happenning there, too.

What is your religion?

Just had to fill in a form about civil service training, and – as usual these days - there was the “a bit about you” section. Brushing aside the sad fact that I’ve moved up a box in the age categories recently, I was amused to see the following qualification in the religion question:

Q37. What is your religion, even if you are not currently practising?

Which very neatly allowed me to tick the ‘Christian’ box without to much trouble.

In case you were wondering, here’s the list of options: 

Christian (including Church of England, Catholic, Protestant and all other Christian denominations)

Buddhist

Hindu

Jewish

Muslim

Sikh

Other(Specify)

No religion

Prefer not to say

Learn social networking in less than a minute

Thanks to Bishop Alan Wilson for posting this on his blog. Everything you need to know about internet social media in less than a minute (by Mitch Benn):