Writer's Block: Password protected

[tabular_rasa]

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It wouldn't change much, lol. My emails of late have been pretty damn boring. In the last month, my emails have been pretty much limited to:
-Lesson plans
-AJET updates about upcoming events (like the Christmas party) and travel opportunities
-Notifications from websites I get email notifications from (Facebook, etc)
-Flight itineraries
-Deals and advertisements from Dell, Victoria's Secret, and Sam's Club, none of which I can use since I don't live in the US
-Survey solicitation ("Amy, take our survey and receive $5.00 in rewards from Delta SkyMiles!")
-Longitudinal survey about the relationship between pop culture and personal relationships
-A couple personal emails from my mom, Lisa, and Robert. Mostly contain links to YouTube videos, and the rest are just small, predictable notes between parent/child, friend/friend, and boyfriend/girlfriend.

There's nothing juicy about any of it, I promise you. Most of it isn't even personal. One of my best girlfriends might roll her eyes at how often Robert and I send each other soppy emails, but it's nothing they would be surprised to read. And as the juiciest stuff would be written by Robert himself the most he can really glean from its presence is thinking it's cute that I've saved it :-P

As for the act of reading my email itself-- while I would prefer permission be asked first, I really don't make that big a deal out of privacy so I think I'd forgive it pretty easily. (Plus, like I said, I don't have anything to hide!). It would not bother me for Robert (or Lisa, or Tiffany, or Jessica, or Brandy) to have the password to my email. On a couple occasions, I have given out a password to these people, and since I seldom change them and often use the same passwords (or only slight variations) for many sites they probably could still hack it if they wanted to. Now, I avoided giving Henry the password to my computer in college, but that was just because he would fuck around with the settings on my programs and download shit I didn't want or need, not because I was afraid he'd read my private bizz-nass. Frankly, someone messing with my settings or potentially deleting material freaks me out a hell of a lot more than simply reading it.

Comments

[scorpiuspro.livejournal.com]

But what if I roll my eyes at my sappy emails to you???

[belovedwarrior.livejournal.com]

You would!

[belovedwarrior.livejournal.com]

Oh, this may be lame of me, but I occasionally scan through my personal messages and imagine, "What if so-and-so where to see this?" or "What if a stranger were to get into my account?" -- Which isn't totally unreasonable since I am pretty lax with security, too.

I either scan to make sure I am not revealing too much (unlikely, I'm an open person) or to wonder what other people would think of me because of it.

There was a dating show I saw once where the guy could see 3 girl's bedrooms and he would choose which one he wanted to date based on her bedroom. It got me to thinking about how well I portray who I am. I don't really care about impressing, just portraying accurately who I am. ;)

Also, I once 'hacked' into a friend's email account once. I set up the email account for her and was in the process of setting it up so her school mail would be filter into this new account so she only had to check one account. Her school email was giving her much trouble and she was using it for personal use. She wasn't tech saavy, so she asked me to help her.

When I was in the account legitimately, I saw my name on email that was clearly not good (the subject line was something obvious like FURIOUS WITH MY ROOMMATE or something) and curiosity got the better of me. I clicked on the email and read a very, very long description of how my roommate was furious with me and couldn't stand me and really insulted me. I have never been that angry at a friend before. It really shook me. Especially because, to my face, my roommate was telling me everything was okay and everything was fine and we didn't need to talk about anything.

Well, the short of the story is that it stopped our friendship. She was furious I had violated her privacy and I was furious she was saying such things about me behind my back without talking to ME even though I was trying. We've since made up and are friends now, but it was rough.

So that's probably why I regularly check.. if any of my friends are reading this, would that be okay? It's a way to be sure that I don't talk bad behind someone's back and that if I am just venting about something, that I, at least, make them aware of the situation.

[tabular-rasa.livejournal.com]

OMG Room Raiders! Lol I used to watch that show sometimes. It was back in early high school or something, though, and I remember thinking that anyone who would raid my room at the time would think that MTV had made a mistake and tried to set them up with a 5-year-old; I still had my frilly canopy bed, tons of stuffed animals, and no sex toys (or particularly graphic literature) to speak of. (That's what always used to crack me up, the boys who'd find sex toys and freak out that they couldn't date a girl who'd use THAT instead of HIM).

My LJ would be much more rich in private information than my email, but I'm not even so scared of that being read, either. In some ways LJ keeps me pretty honest. For years I only wrote public posts, so I had to be extremely tactful and know that I needed to be able to defend whatever I wrote. After I discovered customizable friendslock I ran into a couple of problems posting frustrations about one friend or another to others who knew them, and periodically someone would tattle or the vented-about friend would happen to use LJ on a friend's browser and notice an entry by me they hadn't seen-- and then shit would fly, but no one could ever agree if the fight was more about breach of privacy, talking about people behind their backs, or the issue I had vented about in the first place.

(I'm still totally guilty of using posts locked to only certain friends, but now that's more a necessity of living 15,000 miles and 16 time zones away from my RL friends and not having any other form of contact with the LJ friends I am close enough to want to open up to. I have readers I would have a heartfelt AIM, Skype, or phone conversation with and those I wouldn't; I lock certain more personal topics and experiences to the former group, whether I know them in RL or not).

Plus part of me feels like if anyone comes accross (by accident or deliberate hacking) something they KNOW they were never supposed to read, it's their responsibility to take what they are reading with a grain of salt. If they look into something private, they can expect to find private information. That's kind of the point of privacy settings. That's one reason why the idea of being filmed by the government or stalked by paparazzi doesn't really bother me all that much: Everyone has a certain level of drama and embarassment in their life. Why should I be afraid of the government watching me poop or take a shower, or someone selling a photograph of me dressed in sweats? Presumably everybody poops, showers (frankly, it's more embarrassing if they don't), and has slumming-it days, so why should I be ashamed of having people know that I do, too?-- especially when I'm doing them in the privacy of my own home, as discretely as anyone else, and it's only their excessive interest that has gained them access to it?

And everybody has days they are pissed at somebody and need to get it off their chest-- and with people like me, whose medium is the blog, often that stuff gets saved even when it stops being relevant. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop it hurting the person when they read it, and that's where it gets tricky. We'd like to believe everyone is open and frank with us, but for whatever reason not everyone is-- whether they just hate confrontation, expect the other person not to listen, or just think it's too minor of an issue to address-- and it can come off as two-faced or passive-aggressive, especially when it's an issue that was supposed to have been resolved. But sometimes a vent is just a vent, a one-time burst of emotion that seem a lot more severe when taken out of context, and then it's unfair to blow it out of proportion when it was never meant to be read in the first place. It's hard to judge who's at fault when a breach of someone's privacy reveals something sticky.

[scorpiuspro.livejournal.com]

The only thing very private I have online is as ooolllddddd Xanga account, but even that I wouldn't mind people reading bc if anything, it shows that awkward time where I was living on my own for the first time and going through a lot of stress, so naturally I was very emo. However, I'm such an open person, I doubt people would be very shocked. If anything, I open those old posts up for laughs and to be glad I've since calmed down.

[just-you-wait.livejournal.com]

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