Everyone legally change their name to the current most common name.
I've tried to explain to friends and family that they shouldn't put their first, middle, and last name, all employment info, city, state, etc in their social media bio, and use the same headshot in all their accounts, but they seem to think the sociability/sanity filter that exists in their immediate circle somehow applies to the entire population on the internet.
Yet you'll find exactly nobody walking around, in public, with all of this information on their shirt. People seem to treat the internet as safer than real life public.
Insanely attractive people follow me around constantly and I need some more privacy.
> Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions.
I always have my birthday, age, etc slightly off if possible for instance. I don’t claim to be 130 or something ridiculous. It’s all believable, near-accurate but not too near stuff for me.
Even comments on forums. I lie (in ways that don’t matter/deceive the people being talked to). I lie about my age, my family makeup, etc. when the info is relevant but doesn’t need to be specific. Example: if I’m 40, I’ll say I’m 43 if being in that age range is what matters. If being 40 is what matters, well…I likely don’t need to comment badly enough to give that away.
I also have a secondary facebook account with my real name whose "friends" are only random acquaintances who have bothered trying to connect with me over the years. I have used this in the past when potential employers, or border guards, have asked about my online presence.
I've been online since I was young and deep dark secrets about me are contained and findable on old forum databases and fragments of lost proto-social networks. I might be over-confident, but I'm almost sure not even palantir knows.
I love having a really common name. Growing up, my neighbor down the road had the same name and we'd get each other mail sometimes. One time I even met a guy who had the same middle name as me. It's kind of funny, my name is so common you can't find me on Google, and my girlfriend's name is so unique that there's almost 100% certainty that nobody else in the world has her name, so very googleable. I love the anonymity of my common name and she loves the unique identifier that is hers.
I don't think this is true for most people. Unless you are a relatively prolific (probably top 1% or even 0.1% or less), you likely do not have enough long form writing online to create a unique style fingerprint. All of your accounts will be consistent with having been written by the same person, but absent other information, will not be enough on their own to say that they were written by one and only one person.
And even for people who do have enough writing online to create a truly unique fingerprint, that fingerprint will not be universally applicable to all their accounts (at least not solely by writing style*). Even when you have a truly unique profile for someones writing style, a given writing sample needs to be greater than some minimum length in order to consistently match it.
Linking literally all of your online accounts will probably use writing style as a factor, but I very much doubt it will ever be enough on it's own.
Gotta make at least one-bank-heist-search a month.
"For educational and lawful purposes only"
Your best defense is to use stable identities only for the things where keeping a historical record of your interactions is important to you. So sure, your GitHub portfolio (in the pre-LLM era, I guess), your research papers, maybe LinkedIn. But political flame wars on Reddit? Change accounts and delete comments aggressively, the only value of keeping it around is helping the bad guys.
josefritzishere•1h ago