How do you guys feel about using your real name on the public internet?
3 years ago · 👍 know, degrowther, eph
The reason I say anonymity is impossible is due to things like:
- Linguistics - people favour certain phrases and modes of speech. Any time you've posted more than a dozen pages of text you can probably be ID'd
- Multi-shared content. Ever posted the same/similar content on 'unassociated' sites?
- Tracking access times/patterns. Consider the first 5 sites you visit when opening a browser. Are they the same?
None of the above are technical flaws with the internet - all apply to gemini, ipfs etc. If we include technical attacks such as cache poisoning and browser fingerprinting...
This is why I assume everything I write online can be traced to human-being-me. · 3 years ago
I understand that, from a certain perspective, anonymity is binary: you're anonymous or not, and once somebody has linked an online identity to a person, that identity is no longer anonymous. But on a more humane internet (which I like to think we're building here), anonymity would fall somewhere on a spectrum. For instance, if a friend found my gemlog they'd probably guess that it's me, but when a stranger sees it I hope that it's difficult enough to recover my identity to not be worth the effort — this is a level of anonymity between "totally anonymous" and "not anonymous". · 3 years ago
It deppends on the situation. I have accounts on surface level websites like FB or TicToc that I share with close personal friends and family and then I have this. I do not intermix the two. I also have handles farm more anonymous than this one that have no tether to anything in my personal, or, psuedo anonymous life. It just deppends on how you compartmentalize it. · 3 years ago
real name? NO!
but loosening my privacy to allow people to know me across several platforms on the internet? yes.
anonymity can be very cold and isolating.
sense of community is strengthened when you can distinguish real people from bots or trolls.
not guaranteed to be safe but ..oh well · 3 years ago
I avoid it in certain contexts and embrace it in others. Rejecting all publicity is suspicious, and rejecting all privacy is dangerous. I think the best way is to thoughtfully divide up different facets of yourself among different identities, with varying degrees of anonymity for each.
For me this has been a difficult discipline to learn and maintain, but it gives me some peace of mind. · 3 years ago
Before Social Media Network (before Facebook) anonymity was the rule, and was cool!
Social Network was able to trash the concept of privacy, and now we have the opposite, we have to watch closely our children to avoid to fim themselves doing something stupi d and their content online!
I am not paranoid but I prefer keep my real identity anonimous as much as I can. · 3 years ago
Usually I Phil Collins. ;) · 3 years ago
I really don't mind people being able to figure out who I am with some effort, but I don't want my entire web presence to show up if you google my name (or one of my aliases). · 3 years ago
It will always be possible to link an alias to a person. My solution is a very thin layer of obfuscation to prevent idiots, but there is no point trying to stop google/facebook/governments.
So: make sure you are happy with everything you put on the internet (including gemini) being public. · 3 years ago