Unfortunately, I have been placed in a situation this week where, with one or two exceptions, I am no longer able to trust almost any member of my own family.
Now, I am privileged to be connected via social media with several of the younger members of my wife's clan: bright, talented individuals whose trust I value very much.
There are number of ways I could violate that trust, but consider this particular possibility.
I take it upon myself to copy some material of a comparatively sensitive nature — a post, a picture or a comment — and then show it out of context to another member of the family, one of an older generation who is conspicuously not in the least au fait with these technologies and their basic ground rules.
The wider consequences and damage done by this might be unforseeable, but on own my side at least, thoroughly predictable.
— I would be immediately un-friended
— The person I had thus betrayed would probably call me names like 'backstabbing scumbag'...and I'd be getting off lightly!
— I would start to consider myself extremely fortunate if they ever spoke to me again.
This all depends of course that I have been prepared to do what Guatemala's jailed former president calls 'show face' — in other words, acknowledge that in the act of breaking a family member's trust, one cannot really hold another family member to safeguarding the confidence that preserves one's anonymity.
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