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Comment by jmillikin

  > I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an
  > abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search
  > carefully, but in today's hostile internet I see this kind
  > of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect
  > to have it respected.
Without judging whether the goal is good or not, I will gently point out that your current approach doesn't seem to be effective. A Google search for "BoppreH" turned up several results on the first page with what appears to be your full name, along with other results linking to various emails that have been associated with that name. Results include Github commits, mailing list archives, and third-party code that cited your Github account as "work by $NAME".

As a purely practical matter -- again, not going into whether this is how things should be, merely how they do be -- it is futile to want the internet as a whole to have a concept of privacy, or to respect the concept of a "digital personal space". If your phone number or other PII has ever been associated with your identity, that association will be in place indefinitely and is probably available on multiple data broker sites.

The best way to be anonymous on the internet is to be anonymous, which means posting without any name or identifier at all. If that isn't practical, then using a non-meaningful pseudonym and not posting anything personally identifiable is recommended.

parent jmillikin 4 years ago

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