Digital self-defense: transfer your social media accounts to your cat, dog, parrot, or weasel

From our There is no Mass Surveillance series

The blogster is very privacy oriented, continuously coming up with new suggestions, for example in the post Privacy for Germans: rename all to Haensel & Gretel Mueller?

Recent developments have convinced it* to put forth the suggestion made in the title of this post. The list is not meant to be exhaustive, feel free to add other pets, maybe even your pet rock.

Social media is getting blamed for every ill of society. Good researchers have been trying to put social media into a historical context, but those folks are largely ignored for the juicy click bait narrative.

There is no doubt, however, that governments have become very interested in monitoring social media use by their citizenry. Policing the web is not new, for example, it is well known that German police have been trawling online dating sites for pedophiles by pretending to be underage children.

That's a good thing.

Wholesale monitoring of social media, to the blogster, crosses a line. The first official government forms asking for your social media user name are soon to hit desks in at least one Western country, so, you need to get rid of your social media presence.

Transfer it to a pet.

Don't dismiss the idea. If a space craft, or a potted plant can have a social media account, so can your pet.

Be sure to do the transfer in writing. At least if your are in Germany, because over here, nothing is considered real unless you have it in writing.

Once your pet is the owner of your account, you can post on behalf of the pet. Don't go overboard and start attacking dogs if you are a cat, or vice versa.

Also, be aware that you can still be held legally responsible for the content of a post or tweet.

Ask a lawyer before you tell a government official you do not have an account.

If push comes to shove, you can try (again, ask a lawyer beforehand) to point out that a cat co-authored a physics study in 1975, long before social media existed.

There appears to be one potential issue frequently ignored by people when they select a social media user name or "handle".

This overlooked aspect has to do with prison culture. Apparently, inmates often give nicknames to their fellow prisoners based on some characteristic of the crime they committed.

For example, in the U.S., a bank robber took a taxi to rob a bank.

The robber was caught and duly sent to prison. His nickname became "Taxi".

So, please, do yourself a favor and consider this: how would you feel if your Twitter handle became your prison nickname?

Would you be able to live quietly in a cell with a handle like, say, 'buttlover43', or 'ferrarixxx'?

Of course, this would never happen to you, right?

* Gender neutral, yeah. Also, does that help behind bars?