Internet Anonymity - What is It Good For?

Everything else
41

I came up with the name Creole Ned back in 1997 when a friend and I signed up to play Age of Empires on the Internet Gaming Zone and I’ve used it as my online presence pretty much exclusively since then. Occasionally I even have people ‘recognize’ me from various forums, such as when I was a moderator on the old Sierra Tribes (and Half-Life) forums.

The nickname has become so familiar to me that I don’t blink when people call me Ned face-to-face.

On the other hand, it’s trivially easy to find out my real name, as it’s right there on my blog site. I like the one layer of separation, not because I’ve anything to hide – what you see is what you get – and certainly not because I regularly say things I regret, mostly because it’s just comfortable now, with history behind it that is unique (because it’s all online).

I do use my real name on Facebook but most of my time there is spent hiding the updates of others and not really posting anything, so it hardly seems to count.

I sometimes think about how a prospective employer could find my blog, read my dozens of inane posts from the past five years and draw conclusions on that and realize that I just don’t care. I’m not a controversial, raging kinda guy, so they’re more likely to become bored before anything.

42

I don’t use facebook or post many pictures of me online. In general, I’m a pretty private person.

43

I have multiple online presences right now, each with different boundaries and purposes. Why? Because I am into several different subcultures (raver, kink, and geek, specifically), and I also have a family with young kids in a suburban neighborhood, and a highish-end programming job. Finally, I like having the freedom to be profane and R-rated online.

So there are at least six of me: Dad, Breadwinner, Nerd, Raver, Perv, and Tourette’s Victim. Each has its own set of acquaintances, with overlap; this means my social life is best described by a multidimensional Venn-hypersphere diagram.

There are very good reasons why most people at the “left end” of that spectrum would rather not know about my activities at the “right end”. I certainly do know some other people who fall in 2/3 or more of those categories as well, but most people I interact with casually don’t. So for those people, all our lives are simpler if they don’t Need To Know and in fact don’t know.

Hence, I have multiple different online identities:

  • Facebook: I have only one profile, which has my real name. But I categorize my friends into Freaks (who see everything – mostly ravers & pervs), Family (as you’d expect – friends and family not otherwise freaky), and Workish (career acquaintances). My boss is a Facebook friend in the Workish category, for instance. I set privacy on various items as appropriate, though not with total precision – if someone is following my Wall, I don’t always sanitize perfectly.

  • My blog, which is all about hacking stuff, and which I assume is read by my managers. I use my real name and I behave reasonably well and on-topic there.

  • An old geriatric-raver email list or two, where I use my own name, but it’s not very discoverable.

  • FetLife, another forum altogether for pervs only. That’s where I let that particular freak flag fly.

  • This forum, where I use a pseudonym so I can post whatever random gibberish comes to mind on topics exactly like this, and where I like the freedom of knowing I can vent on something without it being trivially linkable back to me in the very next search that happens.

Yes, people can track me down and link all this together if they try, but if someone cares enough to do that, I’m fine going mano-a-mano with them on whatever they come up with. I am more concerned about the people who would rather not know. If those people don’t trip over the other me’s that they don’t want to know about, we’re good.

Also, if you dig in Google under my real name, you will find five years’ worth of postings to Usenet in alt.sex.bondage and soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm, from the days before search engines (indeed, the days when good search engines weren’t even known to be possible!). So in some sense that cat got out of the bag years ago, and someday I will probably have a good This Is Why Not To Use Your Real Name For Some Things On The Internet conversation with my kids about it.

So there you have it: I have multiple presences and even multiple pseudonyms. Internet multi-personality rocks.

44

You should be ashamed of this.

45

I considered this, but determined it would take too much work, so I just said fuck it instead.

46

I use my real name because I couldn’t think of a good nickname.

47

I do the same sometimes. For me it has to do with language too - sometimes I might come off as snarky asshole when it should be ‘has lame sense of humour’.

Will do, ratbastard!

:-)

48

For me on QT3, this is sometimes true, and sometimes not.

What is true (and obvious) is that I frequently post without a filter. I do not act this way in my job. I talk about things here that are inappropriate for discussion at a job. And with as many posts as I have, there’s something in there to offend everyone.

Now a not-terribly-dedicated individual can pretty easily figure out my real name but ah… at least it keeps the casual snoops away from what I post here.

49

OMG, “Schlickbernd” an awesome name. You have to use “lorini,” because if you went by “Schlickbernd” we would not be able to deal with the awesomeness.

50

Quite a few people know my identity, even on this board, so I’m certainly not completely anonymous, but I do make an effort to protect my privacy from searches. Searching for this handle with my real last name doesn’t bring me up on google at all, and I’ve been using “stusser” along with several other noms du internet since the early 90s. I don’t go out of my way; if someone really wants to find me, they will, but I try not to make it completely trivial.

Actually, checking right now, searching for this handle doesn’t even bring up my first name. So that’s pretty good.

51

Turns out there’s Balasarius punk on Deviant Art from the UK.

Hah! Suck it Joe Williams!

52

MikeSofaer and fire call me Siren in real life, and Mike was the one to coin it as a nickname for me.

It’s certainly an alter-ego and persona that I adopt from time to time. It’s still me, but a little more confident, and with extra helpings of sassy and flirty.

53

Hooo-yeah! Watch out for this one.

54

I adopted this name for Qt3 because of my brothers. Blame them.

55

I was a bit confused by this statement from Tom as well. I understand that he makes a point out of calling people by their real names on his podcasts and as far as I can tell, he tends to call people that he personally knows by their real names instead of their QT3 nicknames. It also seems counter to the idea of QT3 being a place in which people should behave as if they were in a real living room.

56

When I was new to the Internet I never realized so many did not use their real names. Never dawned on me not to, and then there was really no reason to change.

57

This is the only forum I use my real name (and not even my last, just an initial). I’m comfortable enough about the things I say here to do so. Everywhere else I use an alias. Dunno why, maybe burned into my mind from the old BBS/IRC days.

58

I don’t have a problem using my real name, it really all just depends on how I feel when I register for the site or forum. My online persona is pretty much like my offline one so I have no reason to hide from it. I don’t go around trolling people or making insults so I see no real need to pretend I’m somebody else. Even on sites where I use an alias I still post the same way. Also I was just not creative enough to come up with a unique username so I just used my surname. It seems a lot of these smaller types of communities have a great deal of users who use their real name, it’s those larger communities where everybody is generally anonymous.

59

So what’s the over under on when Tim changes it again?

60

I’m just glad Bill Dungsroman uses his real name.