On the web, there are no "true" secrets. Everything is archived for all to see.

In 1999, almost 10 years ago, I began tinkering on the web. I built my very first website. It was all very tentative, with no long-term goals in mind. Not for a moment did I think about whether I wanted my site to be archived forever, but it was.

In July of that year, I also started experimenting with Linux and used newsgroups (remember those?) to get technical support. I got the information I needed but it didn’t occur to me that my questions would still be online almost a decade later.

Luckily for me, I only started being active on the web in the late ninetees when social networks were not mature, and uploading large videos was a pipe-dream. There was no LinkedIn, no Facebook, and definitely no Flickr. Despite this, I still managed to write a few embarrassing posts I’d love to take back. What can I say other than I was young and needed to get things off my chest. I wanted to express myself and own something online. I wrote with reckless abandon, wearing my heart on my sleeve, and never thinking about what the web would or could be. Today, considering I work in the web, I’ve emerged relatively unscathed. There are no pictures of me vomiting, no posts threatening any governments, and no photos of my doing anything illegal. That fact has absolutely nothing to do with any foresight but everything to do with the fact I had no where to easily post things like Twitter.

Today is a completely different story.

Every day new social networks spring up. Along with them a multitude of opportunities to forever incriminate yourself or botch up job opportunities. As I enter a new phase of my life where I’m starting a family, I start to look at the state of the web, and I grow a little uneasy. Every time I join yet another social network, I bring along with me the stories of my co-workers and loved ones. My photos and writings about my friends, their families, and their children will forever be archived online on some box somewhere on the web and things will get hairier for millennials.

Millennials are the first generation to very possibly have their entire life documented online. Photos of their birth, their medical history, their Google searches, their favorite shows, their relationship statuses – everything. Their lives are open books. To make things more complicated, archiving is getting more advanced. The web snapshots are getting more refined. The data is more granular and more can be done with it.

What are the implications?

As my generation was brought up learning how to never talk to strangers on the phone, perhaps the children of today will have to be educated at an early age about the possible dangers of social networks (maybe they do this today – I simply don’t know). How will this affect the social networks of the future? Will the trend towards openness and sharing continue? or will there be a sharp downturn as the general public becomes more web-savvy?

Only time will tell. Until then, I’ll err on the side of safety, and think twice (or maybe three times) before I post photos of the office Christmas party.

What are your thoughts?

Update 1: December 29, 1008

During an exchange with Liz Strauss, she brought up an interesting point that millennials would not miss something, in this case privacy, that they never had. I had to give this some thought, and I have to say I disagree with this line of thinking.

The web is littered with design patterns that imply security and privacy. Lock icons, https protocols, logins and passwords all hint that the information contained within the experience has a private aspect to it. I’m quite certain if one were to ask a Millennial if it were OK to read their Gmail – he or she would object, something to the tune of, “no that’s private”. Facebook has privacy settings in order to hide aspects of one’s profile to certain users – once again, implying privacy exists to a certain extent. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure most millennials don’t truly appreciate how much information Google stores on their searches either.

So, perhaps, when it comes down to it, millennials know, deep down, that their online information is… vulnerable… I just doubt they have any idea of exactly how open, or how archived their information is – and even if they did know, should this be really be the case?