If each person is their own brand, like my marketing professor says they are, then your online identity is a large, integral part of that brand. But how do you manage all of the content, yours or otherwise, that becomes attached to your name?

Take, for example, the other Brittany Creamer. She’s a blonde basketball player in a state several hundreds of miles north of the unathletic, brunette me. I was a little surprised, when logging in to Facebook one day a couple of years ago, to see pictures posted of me with blonde hair surrounded by foreign faces. Although quickly untagging these pictures resolved my mini identity crisis, how do you prevent and manage larger, more serious cases of mistaken identity?

Blogger Esther Dyson suggests the idea of curating your online identity in her blog in MIT’s Technology Review. She raises thought provoking questions about new complexities of personal identities that are less than private-say when your information is hosted on a platform or stored in a database. While she concluded that less vague and abstract user agreements and privacy settings are the quickest fix, I’m still a little skeptical. More specific user agreements could solve disputes about ads tailored to your interests, but I’m not sure how they could help manage user-generated content.

I use stringent limited profile settings on Facebook to prevent my colleagues from seeing my less-than-professional side. My work friends can’t see my wall (no offense!) because I can’t control what my friends post. With Facebook’s redesign, though, a person’s wall is now the page a viewer lands on when they click through to see that person’s profile. The content I created about myself is hidden in secondary tabs. So much for creating your own Facebook persona, now your friends do it for you. So what do my poor work friends see when they land on my new profile? My tight privacy settings now result in my profile looking like a barren desert. My solution? Well, I don’t have one yet. But I’m working on it.

My plan of last resort, should it come to that, will be to generate a fake identity and start all over. It only takes a click of the mouse.