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Comment by confounded | Hacker News Reader

I don’t accept the author’s trade-offs. I can have plenty of gratification and personalization on free services like reddit, HN, and Wikipedia, all under semi-disposable pseudonyms which accumulate data, but which I don’t feel threaten my personal privacy much, if at all.

It’s Facebook and Google’s fussiness about real names and identities (and desire to become something akin to ultra-invasive credit ratings agencies / the next Equifax) that’s the new part about commercial surveillance, and that creates these trade offs.

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You're mistaken if you think pseudonyms somehow will protect your privacy.

Your privacy will be compromised. It's inevitable.

If pseudonyms don't matter, why does Facebook have such a hard-on for collecting real names (even trying to get people's friends to rat them out)?

No, you can still do a lot with compartmentalization. Throwing in the towel just because "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero" is just looking at the glass as half empty.

I didn't say they didn't matter. I said they won't protect your privacy, which they won't.

Also, what's up with the fictitious quote?

> Also, what's up with the fictitious quote?

The quote's real (Chuck Palahniuk did write it, after all); the character who said it was just fictitious. They were just using it to say that you're being overly pessimistic.

Pseudonyms are a fun one. Check out snoopsnoo.com . It's a site that using extremely primitive language parsing to create a profile of Reddit users. It's absolutely unbelievable how much we give away about ourselves when the bits and pieces are collected. Factor in linguistic analysis and I think it's safe to say that the privacy enabled by pseudonyms rapidly approaches 0 as your length of time using that pseudonym grows, even if only on a single site.

I always felt safe posting under pseudonyms, but then realized even if everything else is 100% private, somebody could theoretically use stylometry to identify me based on my posting style.

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