Compartmentalizing Your Online Identity --------------------------------------- Post by Rusty We exist because we have names & numbers that say we do. Ever since we were grade schoolers responding "here" to morning roll call, we've been asked over & over to present those official identities that barnacle onto us. So we forget an essential fact: not everyone needs to know everything about us. Our natural inclination to share has only accelerated in this social media-drenched expository society. Even more dangerously, we now couple this predilection with the nonchalant assertion that, "I have nothing to hide." Have we internalized bureaucracy's modus operandi, recording our lives so they can be inspected? I would go so far as to say we possess a pathological impulse toward transparency, where any hint of shadow in one's life is automatically considered suspect. Yes, institutions use the internet for surveillance, but the net is also where you can successfully fragment your identity into distinct compartments. By skillfully learning what information to reveal in what situations, you can freely interact online while reducing the chances for repercussions IRL. The best method is also one of the simplest, utilized even in the pre-internet days of ham radio: adopt a handle. Rather than publicly broadcasting your given name on every social media account or public discussion forum or blog post, why not adopt a handle that allows a separation between your online identity & the one you maintain IRL? Sometimes folks assume handles are aliases, but they are fundamentally different. An alias is a forged identity, an attempt to fool others into thinking that you're someone else. A handle, on the other hand, fools no one. Everyone knows that a handle stands-in for a person's identity IRL. Just because everyone uses handles on a site doesn't make it a sketchy den of criminals. Rather, the widespread use of handles indicates a collective agreement to not extract extraneous personal data. For example, I go by Rusty on the Mastodon instance "scholar.social" & my avatar is Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica album cover. Other folks in that instance know that I teach writing at a community college, but they don't my name, my location, or where I teach. However, my obfuscating handle & avatar don't prevent me from sharing ideas about open educational resources or mesh-networking or whatever strikes my scholarly interest. I've built a real community with folks & I don't know their names or faces. And why have only one handle? Sure I go by Rusty in some places, but I go by other handles too, ones you'll never know. Another strategy to consider: avoid giving your identity a central point of failure. When you tie all your internet activity to a couple of programs synced on a couple devices, you become remarkably easy to track. A good example: folks signed up for accounts on the dark web illegal drug marketplace Silk Road with their work email addresses. By using an easily traceable email account, these folks obliterated all the anonymity built into the dark web. Work email for work, drug buying email for drugs. Should be glaringly apparent, right? Even if you're not indulging in illegal activity, keeping your internet activity compartmentalized between different programs will help protect you from corporate & government surveillance. It also protects you from malicious actors who wish to steal your identity, sabotage your machines, or dox you. You can possess a shit-ton of email addresses & procure a shit-ton of phone numbers & use a shit-ton of web browsers. Why not use different identity tags for different purposes? For example, when I reserve a hotel room through Expedia, I don't give Expedia my primary email address. I know they're just going to fill my inbox with spam & then sell it to data brokers. So I give them one of my "spam-fucked" addresses that I rarely check, an account not tied to my real name. After all, when you sign up for a trash email address, why not make up a cool name like Hans Vanderrover? In the end, this post has little to do with anything technical; it's more about subtle shifts in online behavior that nonetheless can have seismic consequences. Individuals online should see transparency as a weapon used against them by data-mining corporations & violence-prone states. Now I'm not advocating for what internet scholar Robert Gehl has dubbed a "proactively paranoid" mindset where an individual interprets every online interaction as a threat that needs to be neutralized. Let's face it: being consistently paranoid is exhausting & it seriously undermines the internet's original dream of empowering individuals through connections. Instead, I want us to begin to positively value the role of privacy in our online lives. Sure, as Syrinx noted in the previous post about Freenet, privacy & anonymity can indeed give refuge to nefarious shenanigans. However, we need to stop interpreting an individual's insistence on privacy as a sort of anti-social threat. Privacy grants us all the space to safely experiment with ideas & ways of life, to better understand our constantly evolving selves.