Imagine you are walking down the street. Someone inconspicuously taps you on the shoulder. They then proceed to outline their conception of your ‘personality’, listing your achievements, character-traits, quirks, wants, and needs. However strange this image may seem in a real-world context, this is your relationship with the internet – a singular ‘profile’ that is compiled through detailed analysis of your search and purchase history, Facebook ‘friends’, and messages. On the internet, you are no longer multifaceted, you are simply an ‘identity’.

It was in 2010 that Mark Zuckerberg notoriously proclaimed that “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” It was through this logic that he advocated the notion of having a single, all-encompassing internet ‘identity’, that combined all elements of your personality into one accessible profile. It may not surprise you to learn that Zuckerberg’s motives for this line of argument are financially driven. By simplifying users into units of data, social media megaliths like Google and Facebook can pass your profile on to advertising companies throughout the world, allowing your internet browsing experience to be tailored specifically to your supposed material desires. It is for this reason that Google has increasingly pushed for users to have a single ‘Account ID’ that spans over all of its applications. Thanks to this, they can now ground their advertising in information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Drive, YouTube searches, and Google search history, alongside data from the now well-known ‘Cookies’ feature.

It takes no expert to state that an alarming amount of our personal information remains up for grabs on the internet. The dangers of this were thrown into sharp relief when, on 17 April this year, an Indian hacker group leaked the data of 1.7 million Snapchat users on the internet. Companies like Google can draw on a wealth of this data when constructing your ‘internet identity’. Google itself provides several tools for users to visualise how the company has built up a sense of their personality: Google Dashboard and its ‘account activity report’ are two examples. These services provide us with a fantastic means of testing how much companies like Google know about us. A look at my own Google Dashboard provides an example of how much information you can unconsciously give to websites while browsing.

“It is a long held myth that when you share details with an online company or website you are sharing with them alone.”

The investigation begins well: Google has correctly surmised I am indeed a male within the 18-24 age bracket. However, it is perhaps comforting to note how, beyond this, my Google personality is somewhat flimsier. Among the supposed ‘topics I like’, ‘condos and townhouses’ and ‘folk and traditional music’ are highflyers, suggesting I clearly have a repressed desire to purchase urban property whilst listening to Kacey Musgraves. Equally questionable is my ‘interest’ in ‘parenting’ – to my knowledge, this is not something I should be concerned with. In turn, my internet search activity provides a damning indictment of my otherwise prestigious English degree: ‘SparkNotes’ features embarrassingly high up the list.

Any similar investigation into your own internet identity will uncover that it is impossible to truly represent your identity in one online profile. Rather, we as humans are multifaceted and only bring out various parts of our identity when we are in the appropriate social context. The internet prevents us from having control over when we reveal a facet to the world. An example of this is when employers view your Facebook profile before a job interview, making a prejudgement about your personality based on pictures of drunken Cindies nights or post-ironic revels at Turf. Such a practise is so prevalent among companies that former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt once suggested young people should change their profile names upon reaching adulthood to escape their cyber-past. He told the Wall Street Journal: “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

Perhaps a more serious consequence of the ‘single online persona’ model advocated by Google and Facebook is that it becomes very hard to verify, maintain, and control identity information, especially when these companies lack real regulation. In 2016, for instance, it emerged that a number of UK-based paedophile rings were using secret groups on Facebook to post and swap obscene images of children. Facebook settings meant the groups were not visible to the majority of users and only members could view the images. Facebook’s regulatory measures were clearly not strong enough to deal with these types of criminal practises. This extreme example suggests that when a company collates your information into a singular profile they also take on a responsibility for the monitoring of this information for signs of criminal activity.

The selfish meme

It is a long held myth that when you share details with an online company or website you are sharing with them alone. With Google and Facebook increasingly interconnecting their various services with new applications and advertising companies, a decision to entrust your details with one website is in fact a decision to share information with a wide net of websites.

Your internet identity is becoming further and further distanced from reality, and internet companies exploit the simplification of complex ‘personalities’ into one-sided ‘profiles’ to marketise your internet experience. Noam Chomsky was one of the first to realise this: “The internet’s corporate owners want it to be a technique of control.” In this increasingly interconnected world, maintaining control over your internet identity has become more important than ever