Carl Holscher recently wrote about the sharing culture in social media and his preference for remaining private in some of the services he uses.

Yesterday I signed up to the habit tracking service Lift on the recommendation of Curtis McHale. Lift at the moment say they have no settings to keep your profile private, however they do have a setting there to say that you are interested in such a feature.

Habit tracking is definitely something I'm interested in but this is something I would like to remain private in the long term. While I'm only in the initial phase of evaluating this product, I'm prepared to put up with a public profile for the moment. I don't wish to share on Lift mainly due to the reason that I don't know that many people using it and if I wanted to share, it would be with people I know.

And that sums up my rule really for sharing. If I'm a user of a product or service that involves such actions, I'll restrict my account settings so that I remain private or as private as I can be. If there's a number of people I know on that service, then I'll be a bit more public.

I like sharing, but I prefer my daily interactions such as habit tracking to remain private or only to be shared with people I know. So how do you know people without ever actually meeting then? That's another blog post for another day.