by Elizabeth, Delightfully Tacky
Email-
I keep my blog email completely separate from my personal email. This way people can't search for me with my email address. Plus, it just makes it easier to separate who is trying to contact you from your blog versus people in "real life" who are emailing you personally. There are also measures you can take to keep spammers from grabbing your email. Instead of writing your email like delightfully-tacky@hotmail.com you can write it like delightfully-tacky [at] hotmail [dot] com. It just makes it a little harder for spammers to grab your email.
Location-
One thing I'm pretty conscious about it not letting people know where I live. While I'll talk a lot about Tacoma and my favorite places in Tacoma, I won't let people know my address and I'll try to not show landmarks near my home. I guess if someone was really adamant about trying to find my house they might be able to, but I like to keep it as difficult as possible. I'll even go so far as to photoshop out the address number on my house or apartment to keep people from seeing it in my photos. Sometimes I've photoshopped out my license plate on my car too. Another thing that you might want to do is keep your workplace off of your blog too. It's just another way that someone can find you.
One thing that I've started doing is not letting people know when I'm on vacation until after the fact (if possible). I once heard about how someone's house was broken into after they tweeted that they were out of town. I figure it's best to protect yourself from people who may be out to take advantage of you. You never know who is following you online. Most likely it's just people who are interested in your blog, but there could also be weird creeps that live near you and don't have good intentions!
Your Life-
This one is really up to your personal preference as to how much of yourself you want to put out there. How much about your personal life do you want to share? Some people will choose to share very little about their real lives, and others will just lay it all out there. I like to keep a good balance of being open and honest, but also not simply unloading all the crap from my day onto the internet. For me, I like to keep my blog positive and upbeat. I figure there's already so much unhappiness and ugliness in the world and I don't need to contribute to it. That doesn't mean that I'll sugarcoat everything or pretend that I'm super happy if I'm not, but I'm not going to go of on a rant about something terrible that happened if I don't feel like it's uplifting or helpful to others. It's always up to you to how much you share with the world wide web. Make sure you think about what you feel comfortable sharing, and if you feel like you're starting to share too much, dial it down. I think it's important to share at least some of your life with your readers, just because they're interested in you and your life! It creates a connection between you and your readers and they start feeling invested in you.
One thing that I've never really dealt much with is keeping people from your real world from knowing about your blog. This is more important for people who feel like it wouldn't be beneficial if coworkers or friends knew about it, or if your employer would feel odd about you having a blog. Some bloggers are teachers or work with youth and they try to keep their students from finding out about their blog. Other people feel like they might lose credibility at their job if people knew about their blog. I know some people have family members who are uncomfortable with blogging, so in that case they even have to keep their blog from their family. Sometimes it's unavoidable to have people finding out about your blog (since it is online and readily available for anybody to see), but you can definitely take measures to keep people from finding out about it.
For about the first two years of blogging I didn't let any of my readers even know my first name! I still don't have my last name on my blog. It keeps people from being able to google your name and find your blog.
Photos-
One thing that is kind of annoying is the fact that once you put your photos up on the internet, they're kind of up for grabs. You could watermark your photos, but I personally hate the way that watermarked photos look-- the watermark is just always so distracting to me. But the downside of not protecting your photos is that people can take them and not give proper credit or even pretend to be you! If you think that's crazy, trust me, I've had it happen. Most of the time, though, when you find that happening, you can usually email the site's administrator and have them remove the person. So decide if you want to watermark your photos or protect them in some way.
There are a lot of ways to protect yourself on the internet. Make sure that you're really intentional about how much you want to share about yourself. It's a crazy world out there and sometimes we can get caught up in how nice all of our blogging friends are that we forget that there are those crazies out there as well. Protect yourself and your privacy!
