There is this web site that Max and I have discussed off line. atlinks.com gathers all your chip timed race results and posts them in one place. It does this automatically whether you are registered or not which I discovered by accident when the link came up in a google search for something else running related. If you register, you can create a page for yourself, add data, delete results that aren't actually you, search for friends, rivals, etc.
Like most things on the web, I am of two minds about this. First, for me this isn't that helpful since it duplicates my running diary. Second I was a bit weirded out that all my race data was being collected by a commercial site and publicly available for years without my knowing it. On the other hand, it is convenient and its fun to see how fast Max is at all distances.
On the serious side, it brings home the changing nature of privacy in a very personal way. I can't lie about race times even if I wanted to, but at the same time I can't explain when I was injured or pacing my sick grandmother. However, atlinks and a smart phone did let me easily establish my eligibility for a seeding corral at two different races when the organizers screwed up my original registration.
Ah, brave new world.
I go with cool. This is not the kind of personal information that at all worries me about disclosure (as evidenced by my actually setting up an athlinks page -- I don't do facebook but I do do athlinks!). If I want to be anonymous, which I sometimes do in small races, I can race under a pseudonym. You'd be surprised how many ~45:00 10Ks Haile Gebraselassie has run in the DC area.
ReplyDeleteI have a student working on a taxonomy of personal information for a paper on remedies for non-permissive disclosures. Her basic idea is that the less likely to lead to financial or emotional harm, the less of a concern the information is. Names, pretty safe. Health information, much less so. I suppose one could be embarrassed about one's racing, but one will rarely use race information as a password.