If the director of the CIA can be caught in a lie, anyone can. More than ever before, our communications leave trails. Whether we imagine them to be “digital exhaust,” as many tech theorists do, or fodder for a bits-based Big Brother, as Orwell might have, our Facebook timelines and e‑mail chains and cellphone logs are leaving copious and minutely detailed records of our lives. Which means that the claims we make about ourselves, from the big to the banal, can, as never before, be cross-referenced against reality. Stuck in traffic? This real-time map suggests otherwise. Never got the e‑mail? The sender’s read receipt begs to differ. You’re 25? That was true, a Google search says—five years ago.

A truism widely attributed to that most famous of truth-tellers, Abraham Lincoln, holds that “No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.” Increasingly, though, it’s collective memory that dooms a liar. People lie less over e‑mail than they do in person, one of Hancock’s studies concluded—likely because, though we’re messaging over a physical distance, the digital letter is more permanent than fleeting speech. Résumés posted to LinkedIn, another of his studies found, contained fewer lies than their pulp-printed counterparts. Just knowing that one’s claims can be seen by a large and undefined group of people, Nicole Ellison noted, can help enforce honesty. The network can be its own kind of lie detector.

That point is crucial. Whether we’re communicating via clay tablets or telegraph wires or fiber-optic cables, our deceptions are kept in check by an overarching fact that has little to do with technology and everything to do with community: we want other people to trust us. We may lie sometimes, but we don’t want to be seen as liars. A classic survey asked participants to rank the general desirability of 555 different personality traits. The one that ranked at the very bottom, dead last out of 555, was “liar.” Ultimately, other people, more than technology, are the force that keeps us honest. One of the more delightful entries in the annals of deception research involves the finding that the physical proximity of eyes (even mere photos of eyes, pasted on a wall) can encourage what researchers call “normative behavior”—in this case, honesty.

And if one thing is fairly certain about our digital trajectory, it’s that we will be increasingly connected to other people in the months and years to come. Those connections, furthermore, will be increasingly well documented. Hancock points out that his young daughter “will grow up in a world where not only much of what she says gets recorded, but probably much of what she does.” The technologies that change the way we think about privacy will also, inevitably, change the way we think about honesty. More eyes will be on us. More people will know us. The successful liar may still require an extraordinary memory; the question is what happens when we encounter technologies that refuse to forget.

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