digital identity

Reclaiming My Digital Identity

Posted on by Jon K.

After deleting my Yahoo accounts and thinking about the stuff that’s gathered all around the web – I think it’s time to reclaim my stuff. So I made  a list of all the places I consume/create things on the web:

  • Faceboook – how I connect to family and friends, manage a band page
  • Flickr – still have some photos there
  • Tumblr – Hamilton Punk and Hardcore visual archive
  • Picasa/Google Photos – have quite a few photos from my phone
  • Instagram – yeah, photos here too
  • Twitter – my edtech tweets
  • Google+ – not really but some stuff there
  • various message boards – music, music and more music
  • LinkedIn – work related
  • PebblePad – ePortfolio
  • Trello – abandoned workflow/project management
  • Vimeo – portfolio related videos
  • YouTube – portfolio, music (two separate accounts), general watching (yes, a third account for stuff I’ve watched)
  • Discogs – record collection
  • Google Drive/Docs – three different accounts for three reasons (work, personal/travel, music)
  • Dropbox – filesharing
  • Diigo – bookmarks 
  • The Old Reader – RSS
  • Netvibes – RSS

Some of those make sense to reclaim (photos for sure), some don’t because the purpose is to leverage their platforms to communicate. The ones in italics make some sense to reclaim to me. The one benefit is that the storage for stuff out there, is paid for by someone else. However I’m thinking about how a website reflects one’s identity and maybe it’s time for a more holistic version of what I am, who I am.

No comments yet

Goodbye to All the Yahoos

Posted on by Jon K.

No, this isn’t some grandiose sign-off from public life (although I’m fairly certain I should probably do that…). Really it’s the end of an era where I’ve finally deleted all my Yahoo related accounts. I really only had two Yahoo accounts, one for life (dietsociety@yahoo.com) and one for “professional life” (jonkruithof@yahoo.com). But with stuff like Facebook linked to my life account at Yahoo (who’ve had some serious data breeches) I really didn’t feel safe anymore with it. I had the Yahoo account since the late 90’s, because I was a Rocketmail user, and Yahoo bought them out. It was a long process, to finally pull the plug. I started migrating mail from Yahoo late last year. I thought about migrating my band photos from Flickr but realized that I didn’t really care – I have them still and can post them in a gallery on my own website.Or maybe I don’t really care about them either? I don’t know. Flickr’s social aspects are a mere blink of what they used to be. I don’t know that they need to be online at all. The hardest part is all the places with logins tied to the yahoo account. Holy smokes, ten years of logins, some at places that don’t exist anymore.

The tipping point was my Instagram account being hacked, e-mail changed and then deleted in rather quick succession. I got on to the Yahoo account associated and deleted it. And that was it. Identity snuffed out. All the angry e-mails, pranks, early evidence transferred to Gmail for searchability and for it to exist somewhere (I do have some prized correspondence with now dead people that I treasure – as well as digital ephemera that is fun to dig up and look at from time to time) was comforting,

With all that said, I don’t think moving to Gmail is that great an idea but it’s what I’ve done. I keep the name dietsociety because, well, it’s in a lot of places, but 15 years since doing anything resembling a zine, maybe I need to let that go too.

No comments yet