Why Posting Your Photos Online Is the Stupidest Thing You Can Do
I think posting photos of myself online is one of the dumbest bargains I could make, and I say that as someone who has made plenty of stupid bargains in my life. I hand over my face, my clothes, my house, my holidays, my mates, my habits and half the contents of my fucking kitchen, and in return I get a few little hearts from people taking a shit while scrolling through their phones. What a deal. I might as well give a stranger the keys to my house because he complimented my curtains. I’m handing out information about myself like a pissed bloke handing out chips outside a kebab shop, then acting surprised when someone else starts eating them.
I don’t understand why I’d want strangers to know what I look like at breakfast, what pub I drink in, where I went on holiday, what my living room looks like, what car I drive, who I spend time with and where I like to sit with a coffee. That isn’t sharing my life, that’s publishing the fucking instruction manual. I’m turning myself into a little intelligence file with nice lighting. I’ve got the location, the associates, the routines, the possessions and the emotional weak spots, all arranged between photos of dinner and some sunset I apparently thought humanity couldn’t survive without seeing.
I think the really daft part is that I’d never give most of this information to someone who knocked on my door. If some bloke with a clipboard asked when I was going away, where I worked, who my girlfriend was, what my kids looked like and which gym I used, I’d tell him to fuck off before his pen had touched the paper. Put the same questions inside an app with a cheerful little camera button and I’m supposed to volunteer the lot. I’ve seen less enthusiastic surrender from people filling out tax forms. I’m not being interrogated, I’m doing the paperwork myself and adding flattering photographs.
I don’t even need to post anything mental. That’s the beauty of the stupidity. One photograph tells fuck all, but fifty photographs start joining hands. I wear the same work badge. I stand outside the same building. I drink in the same place. I photograph the same street. I mention the same people. I complain about the same boss. I disappear on holiday and show everyone that I’ve disappeared on holiday. I’m leaving breadcrumbs across the internet like Hansel and Gretel after six pints, except the breadcrumbs contain my face, my routine and enough background detail to make a nosy bastard feel like Sherlock Holmes.
I’m even worse when I post from inside my own home. There I am grinning beside the Christmas tree while the photograph contains the television, the expensive laptop, the window layout, the garden, the front door and enough domestic detail to make an estate agent start rubbing his thighs. Then I post from Spain three days later. Brilliant. I’ve managed to combine a catalogue of my possessions with confirmation that I’m nowhere fucking near them. I might as well put a sign outside saying, please rob me, the good stuff is upstairs, mind the loose paving slab on the way in.
I’m not worried about some cartoon villain sitting in a dark basement with twelve monitors and leather gloves. I’m worried about ordinary human beings being ordinary human beings. Employers snoop. Ex partners snoop. Colleagues snoop. Neighbours snoop. People I’ve annoyed snoop. People I’ve never met snoop because boredom is powerful and humans are nosy little fuckers. I know this because I’m human too. Give me ten minutes and enough public information and I can form opinions about somebody I’ve never met. They might be completely wrong, but wrong opinions can still cause damage. A brick doesn’t need the correct postal address to smash the wrong window.
Then there’s vanity, the little turd sitting in the middle of the whole thing wearing sunglasses. I tell myself I’m sharing memories, but I know there’s often another ingredient in the stew. I want to be seen. I want the holiday noticed. I want the meal admired. I want the new shirt approved. I want somebody I haven’t spoken to since 2014 to register that I’m having a nice Tuesday. What the fuck am I doing? I’m converting my private life into a shop window because some bloke called Darren might tap a thumb on it while waiting for his microwave lasagne.
The worst photographs aren’t even the embarrassing ones. I can survive looking like a twat. I’ve spent decades doing that without technological assistance. The dangerous photographs are the boring ones because I stop seeing the information inside them. A birthday photograph shows relationships. A school photograph shows children. A work photograph shows employment. A holiday photograph shows absence. A gym photograph shows routine. A new house photograph shows location and possessions. I see a harmless picture. Somebody with a reason to study me sees pieces. I’m playing poker with my cards facing the table while wondering why everyone else seems calm.
I’m not pretending I can become invisible either. My face exists. Cameras exist. Governments, companies and platforms collect mountains of information whether I like it or not. I’m not wandering round wearing a balaclava and communicating through carrier pigeons because I’ve discovered privacy. I just don’t see why I should help. If some enormous corporation wants to build a digital picture of me, I don’t feel obliged to turn up with sandwiches and a fucking presentation. They’ve already got enough machinery pointed at my life without me standing under the spotlight and shouting, here’s another angle lads.
I’ve become suspicious of the phrase, I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve got nothing to hide when I’m having a shit either, but I still close the bathroom door. Privacy isn’t evidence of guilt. It’s the normal condition of having a life that doesn’t belong to every passing stranger. I don’t hide my bank balance because I’m secretly Pablo Escobar. I don’t publish it because it’s nobody else’s fucking business. I don’t announce every argument, every friendship, every journey and every purchase because information has value, and giving valuable things away for nothing is generally considered stupid unless an app has persuaded me to call it content.
I see the online circus and I can’t get over how fucking weird it has become. People document themselves as if a government archivist has threatened them with prison unless every Sunday roast receives photographic evidence. Whole lives get turned into public noticeboards. New relationship, photograph. New baby, photograph. New house, photograph. Airport, photograph. Hospital, photograph. Funeral, photograph. I’m half expecting people to post their PIN numbers beside a picture of the cash machine because the lighting looked nice. I don’t think technology forced this out of us. I think it found vanity, loneliness and boredom sitting together in a pub and bought the bastards unlimited drinks.
I’d rather keep something back. Not because I’m mysterious, important or living some glamorous secret existence. Most of my private life is probably as exciting as the instruction booklet for a toaster. That’s beside the point. What belongs to me has value because I decide who gets it. The second I publish a photograph, that decision starts slipping out of my hands. Screenshots exist. Downloads exist. Archives exist. Facial recognition exists. Some photograph I posted because my hair looked decent can end up travelling further than I ever will, while I sit there clutching my little privacy settings like a pensioner defending himself from a burglar with a rolled up copy of the Radio Times.
So I’m increasingly convinced that the smartest photograph I can post is the one I don’t post. I can take it. I can keep it. I can send it to people I trust. I can look at it in ten years and remember the day without having donated the fucking thing to the global jumble sale of human information. I don’t need to turn every memory into public property. I don’t need applause for eating dinner, visiting a beach or owning a dog. I’ve already spent enough of my life giving giant technology companies free labour, free attention and free information. I’m not chucking my face into the bargain like a complimentary fucking bread basket.
Because that’s what gets me. I’d laugh at a bloke who stood in the town centre handing strangers photographs of his house, his children, his holidays, his mates and his favourite pub. I’d assume he’d escaped from somewhere with padded walls and disappointing cutlery. Yet put a smartphone in his hand and suddenly the whole performance becomes normal. I’m supposed to join in, smile nicely and feed another photograph into the machine. Fuck that. If the internet wants a detailed scrapbook of my life, it can do what every other nosy bastard has to do and work for it.