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Comment by cornstalks | Hacker News Reader

Not OP, but I found it by going to your HN profile, seeing your email listed there, searching that username, finding a GitHub profile with the same username, then using your first and last name plus your location (listed in your GitHub profile) to look you up. Your profile photo on GitHub gave me your approximate age (middle age, clearly not a teenager or a senior).

Searching your name and city+state in Google shows several websites that collect public records and show relatives. Some include age with names. The only people that showed up as relatives that were plausibly your parents (based on age) were two people: one with your same last name (probably your father), and one with a different name (Klass) (most likely your mother).

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Thanks. I knew it was easy to get to my name from my HN provided info. I wasn’t sure how easy it was to get from there to my parents.

Having a pretty rare last name makes it really hard to stay anonymous, especially when you engage in public activities like entering road races, buying a home, and voting. Guess it’s a bit late to start using a pseudonym.

Edit: mylife is insane. I’ve googled myself in the past and this much information didn’t used to be so readily available in search results.

I don’t know how a right to disappear would even work when a bunch of the results are curated straight from public records.

Edit 2: I think if I cared more about this I’d have to engage in a prolonged disinformation campaign to muddy the search.

"Guess it’s a bit late to start using a pseudonym"

Actually, no. It only takes 2-3 years to disappear from most casual google searches. I know people always say 'the internet is forever' and for some things it might be, but I was suprised how much of my online traces just faded over time after I started being more careful with my identity.

I had a bit worse experience. I was a bit careless with posting personal info under a quite specific username I reused on multiple websites, it took me nearly 10 years and changing that username (you might also note that my usernames are more or less random) to finally not be able to google myself (which I consider to be the real test of anonymity). Various forums finally dying in 2010s were a great help.

I ran across this a few years ago. I made the mistake of registering a .us domain with my home address. Found out the stupidity of that when my wife's ex, who has been out of her life for over 10 years at that point, sent us a wedding gift. We both have fairly unique names - there's only 1 of each of us with the same first/last name in the US. Makes me pretty paranoid about tying stuff to my real name now.

What was the wedding gift?

Nothing particularly odd, just some mixing bowls. But my wife threw it out when she got it.

I'm of two minds as to whether it's better to be wholly unique like my First Name/Last Name pairing is or to have a name like John Smith.

The worst is doubtless to share an uncommon but not unique name with someone who could plausibly be you who is controversial/a criminal/etc. Pre-Web I went to school with someone who shared a name with a very unpopular figure in the same city. My schoolmate got literal death threats left on his answering machine.

These are essentially the same steps I took.

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