Breaking the Ties

Once you have changed course and are able to adequately stay in contact with those you choose, and only those you choose, it's time to get out of the social cesspool to have good clean communications flowing.

1.1. Courtesy

Be courteous in notifying your family and friends (the real ones you might actually talk to from time to time) your decision to change course and how they can continue to stay in touch. A few guidelines in letting everyone know:

Send individual notes if at all possible. This helps to convey that you want to stay in touch with them personally.
Provide alternate means of reaching you.
If you praise your new Internet presence mention it's benefits to you, but focus on the positive aspects of the software approach for the participants or everyone in general.
Be matter of fact about your change and avoid slamming the service your leaving. Remember, many of those your notifying remain with the service your leaving. Having an arrogant or berating stance towards the service is indirectly slamming their judgement which can only serve to minimize the acceptance of your decision.
Go ahead and create accounts for others if you are hosting a communication software that accepts logins. If you send personal messages, that is an opportunity to convey new account information.
Avoid setting up others with automatic notifiers without their permission, otherwise you will quickly alienate your friends as a spammer.
Be patient. Because you are doing something new doesn't mean everyone is going to follow right away. As more people trickle towards independence the wave will eventually follow.

Example Group Email

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Example Individual Email

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1.2. Breaking Free

Account Killer

With your new residence in place on the net and the address given to those you care about, all that's left is to leave the boarding house behind.

The "Account Killer" web site has a database of over 1,400 sites and services listed with instructions for deactivating accounts. The information is well organized and easy to navigate. This is also a good site to reference before opening an account as they rate each site as "white," "grey" and "black" regarding the ease of deleting an account. White sites allow for complete deletion, black site do not allow for deletion at all and grey sites make it challenging to delete, or leave it undefined as to how thoroughly accounts are deleted.

1.3. Abyss Emails (amail)

Even though you've taken yourself out of the repositories, you are still profiled closely through your family and friends that remain with the centrallized services. Dropping from the social services is one thing, but dealing with friends email accounts is quite another. Sending an email to a friend with a gmail account is still read, relationship information inferred and profiles built with Google. This is the most difficult part of changing course. There are several ways of dealing with this problem. Several possibilities are listed below in what we consider to be increasing degrees of severity. Not all these solutions are for everyone. Choose what works best for you without creating problems for yourself.

Discussion: Mention the hazards of unprotected email accounts to family and friends and provide alternatives. Don't pressure them to change. Simply lead by example. They will be watching to see how it works out for you.

Filtering: Continue to send emails as usual, but limit content in emails sent to public addresses. Refrain from listing specifics of activities, locations, dates and especially product names.

Diversion: Open an account at a completely separate trusted public repository like Hushmail for use with the insecure accounts of friends.

Screening: Put an autoresponder on the email account used for general interactions (not the personal one you give to friends) that automatically rejects emails from gmail, Yahoo, hotmail and other public repository addresses with a statement that you do not conduct business with these types of accounts, which you shouldn't do anyway.

Blocking: Put an autoresponder on all email accounts rejecting emails from public repository addresses with a friendly message of regret to family and friends and a "you should know better" message to businesses.