Control: the choice is yours?

How can you control your digital persona? Is the control truly in your hands? With shadow profiles and digital fingerprinting, some entities - outside of your control - know more about you than you can ever collect online about yourself.

Option one: not opted in

If you are one of those super conscious among us, who at a very early age decided to not start registering on various platforms and not build online profiles, you certainly have a smaller digital footprint. But not zero.

You thought you have a choice: to not opt in, not participate in any shape or form. At least not revealing or linking your true name to your online actions.

Very wise.

Advantages:

• truly minimal digital footprint (that can be tracked back to you)

Disadvantages:

• potentially missing out on opportunities (judge for yourself)
• still cannot control the "narrative" about you

Option two: wanting to opt out (withdraw)

Made the "mistakes" early on and started creating online profiles, very likely with your real name. It's very difficult now to opt out, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

You made a choice: you want to participate, and you are brave enough to use your real name. Nice.

Good choice. But are you really in control?

Partially.

Advantages:

• on some core platforms you own your own name/alias
• you have some level of control, what content gets associated with your name/digital persona

Disadvantages:

• the illusion that you have ALL control
• exposing your real name (even if it's an alias, sooner or later the association can be and will be done to your real identity)

Option three: Intentionally removing (or keeping) online profiles

With many online profiles, you now have a choice: which one to keep and which one to destroy.

With professional services around opting out and requesting the removal of profiles and personal data, this is an option.

Keep core online profiles - where you control the content about yourself - and deliberately destroy the ones where you either not interested, lost control, or simply did not create yourself in the first place.

Option four: go all in

Is it better to get hold of and gain control over all possible online profiles that you can have?

Some think, this is the way.

Deliberately and intentionally register your alias or name on most platforms to gain control of the content you publish there.

A sense of control is there. It's a lot of work, is it worth it? Many think it is.

Where are you in all this?

• Have your own name registered as a domain name?
• Do you publish some content on that domain? Running a blog?
• Moving on to build your personal "brand"?
• Sync your "bio" among all the major platforms?
• Keeping track of what to post on which platform?

Alternatively, trying to remain fully and truly anonymous?

What do you think?