Private blogging

Private blogging

Levels of privacy

So you have decided to start blogging? You’ve got your first post ready to go, but for some reason you have feel slightly uneasy about hitting the publish button? Thinking about ways to make blogging less anxiety ridden? Here is a post about private blogging, or perhaps more accurately about ways to keep on blogging without exposing more of your private life than you think is necessary.

However, first a general warning. Even if there are a number of steps that you can take to make it less clear to the reader who you are, everybody says there is no complete privacy on the internet. If somebody is skillful enough and really want to they will probably find a way to find out who you are. Also, remaining private requires continued vigilance. You will have to think about the content of every blog post, and potentially every comment to your blog posts, for as long as you continue blogging. This is like the Miranda warning US police officers are required to give suspects prior to questioning: anything you write can be used against you! Nonetheless, there are certain steps you can take that will make it more difficult for the casual reader to ascertain who you are.

A second general note before turning to the various suggestions: your reason for blogging will determine your optimum level of privacy. If you mainly are interested in creating an online diary to be shared with your family members spread out across the globe you can probably strive for a very high level of privacy. In contrast, if you want to use your blog to earn money you will probably have to accept a much lower level of privacy. To earn money you need to attract advertisement, and to do so you will have to attract as much traffic as possible. This in turn means that you likely will have to make your blog both accessible and personal, thus the lower level of privacy.

The suggestions below are organized by levels of privacy, starting from basic over intermediate to advanced. The increasing levels of privacy do however come with a cost, primarily in terms of onerousness. You will simply have to put in more work if you truly want to blog in private.

Basics

The basic level mostly involves rather standard internet precautions. This includes avoiding publishing your name, your picture, your phone number etc.

You will most likely need to provide an email address when registering your blog account, in which case you should use an address specifically created for this purpose on, say, Gmail, Hotmail or another free service. Using a free service avoids having to pay for the email account, thus limiting the risk of somebody discovering your true alias.

For the same reason it may be advisable to choose a free blog account, for instance provided by WordPress or Blogger.

A slightly higher level of privacy is offered by the privacy options provided by some blog accounts. In Google’s blog account Blogger you may for example decline having your blog added to their listings, in which case it cannot be linked to. You can also make your blog unsearchable, thereby preventing somebody out there googling from accidentally ending up on your blog. To access your blog the reader will have to type in the name of your blog account (or your URL) in the search window of the browser. You can also make your blog private, in which case access is restricted to readers selected by yourself. While it may be require some work to locate and decided upon the privacy options, this is a one-time investment as this will not have to be repeated.

Intermediate

The next level up primarily involves making use of some dedicated privacy programs. These options will involve locating and installing the programs, which doesn’t have to be particularly difficult but nonetheless more than using the privacy options provided by your blog provider.

Instead of choosing any free email service, you could for instance choose an encrypted email service when registering a blog account (Hushmail, Protonmail, Tutanota etc). This will make it impossible to trace you through your email account through your IP-address.

There are also some relatively standard privacy programs that do things like prevent others from tracking your internet activities through the collection of cookies etc.  Programs such as Disconnect, or Ghostery, will do the trick. Again, this mainly involves a one-time effort, once the programs are installed you will not have to attend to them.

Advanced

Something that in some ways is easy to implement, but also rather cumbersome, it to protect your privacy by not blogging from home or from work. This will require you to blog from your laptop in varying places, such as internet cafés or cafés offering a Wi-Fi connection. While this comes with some dangers in itself, it will make it harder to trace your blog account to you.

The possibly highest level of privacy would be obtained by using a secure browser when blogging, e.g. Thor. An alternative would be to blog using a virtual private network (VPN). In both these cases it would be impossible to track the IP address that you use when logging on to the internet.

Teaching and blogging

Some of these options will probably seem more relevant to undercover journalists, whistleblowers, or bloggers in countries with oppressive governments than to the average teacher. How should or could one as a teacher think about privacy when using a blog? In some ways, the idea of privacy is moot when you blog as a teacher, your students will after all have to know who you are. Moreover, as a teacher you are most likely to have some public internet presence anyway, for instance the webpage of your school, the list of faculty, the curriculum posted online or maybe even your personal homepage at your school. But this I will have to return to in some later blog.