I started The House That Lars Built for a grad school project 8 years ago. It was a residential interior design class and the assignment was to design a house. I created a fictitious family, The Showers, to be the owners and thought they might be interested in seeing the progress I was making on the house so I started this blog. I included pictures of each “family” member along the side bar. There was April the daughter, Abraham the son, Imogen the mom, and Lars the dad. Each one represented a different portion of the arts. April was the classical musician, Abraham the band musician, Imogen the dancer, and Lars the fashion designer.
After the class ended I continued with the blog yet the aliases remained. I was super shy to reveal who I was and I hid behind these names for a number of years and nervous about the implications that come with your information out on the World Wide Web. At this point, Facebook was now a thing and then one after the other social media became what it is today.
There came a point when I realized that I needed to connect more with my growing audience so I thought the best thing to do would be to be more open about who I was. Since that point, I’ve become rather lax in protecting my name. I share photos left and right, my Facebook login information is, no doubt, shared with the world. You see way too much of me these days!
But we’ve all been affected in some way by some breach of privacy. Whether big or small, it is frightening and and a violation of our safety.
I’m pleased to partner with Sudo, an app that is changing the online identity game. They are making it easier to protect you and your family by creating various aliases for the different parts of your life: social, shopping, dating, selling, business. They assign each section its own email address and phone number so you can work fluidly yet remain safe.
I’ve been trying out the app with a number of projects for work lately, most recently a few weeks ago. When I got back from Christmas break I found that a ton of my projects in the basement had been eaten by mice. I’m talking poop everywhere not to mention they had eaten half of my props. Even though I knew they were itty bitty mice, I still felt totally violated and so so mad. I stopped my work and spent a few days putting order into the world. We used Sudo to begin the shopping process of purchasing plastic bins and a label maker and getting ourselves organized! We even used a special Amazon account linked to Sudo.
I’ve been pleased with how easy it has been to use. It may sound like a lot of upkeep to assign different aliases to certain functions, but it’s kept all in one place and easy to navigate.
As one who’s been historically shy and nervous about my online identity, and now that we see the amount of damage that can come from revealing too much information with hackings and identity theft, anything that makes me feel more empowered to take control over my identity is something that I welcome.
You can download the Sudo app in the app store.
This post is sponsored by Sudo. Thanks to the brands who keep Lars thriving.