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Comment by RenRav | Hacker News Reader

I would consider being an online ghost as a great compliment with how everything has been lately. There is way too much public information being pumped out for no reason at all.

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This was my sentiment while reading the article. Two years ago I went through a process of completely stripping away my online presence. I'm now unsearchable by name, name and company, name and home town.

The author's reasons for having an online presence don't appeal to me personally. I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

I too stripped away my online presence a few years ago. I even went ahead further and deleted all my accounts I don't use, aren't privacy-oriented, etc. I now have a spreadsheet of the very few accounts I have for specific products and services. To that extent, I rarely sign up for anything new these days and or use a lot of applications and services.

I also say nay to having an online presence. I prefer silent, out-of-sight, deep work. On the other hand, I do support having a blog to journal and or log about anything you'd like, public or private. If public, I suggest to not use your real name, etc, but an unusual name like a 8-bit binary number.

Not having an online presence is free-ing. Having an online presence feels like you're a brand and are subjugated to update. Cal Newport might have talked about something along these above things in his latest book, "Digital Minimalism".

I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines. I have several name-doppelgängers out there that do ample SEO for themselves. Plus we have the rapper now. I have close to zero presence on social media. You would be hard pressed to find a single photo of me by doing basic name and location searches. Really didn’t have to do any scrubbing or “reputation management.” I consider it a real, rare blessing in this world where online privacy is disappearing.

I have no doubt a highly motivated and technical individual (or nation state adversary) could find and dox me, but the average curious HR person or run-of-the-mill stalker will likely not have much luck.

>I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines.

Same here. My ultra-common first and last name means I'm also essentially unsearchable. On occasion as an experiment I'll try to find myself using combinations of my name (including an also-super-common middle name) and birth city, cities I'm lived in, jobs I've had, companies I've worked for, hobbies, and other things would normally narrow down a person in a search engine. I've never found myself. I've gone a hundred page deep in google, bing, duckduckgo, and others (both regular and image searches) and I've never once found me. It's like having an invisibility superpower.

Same here. It also makes it harder to find you in gigantic password db dumps.

It's an interesting consideration in naming a child.

> I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

So can and do I. This nickname belongs to a "fake identity" I use online for services where I don't want to be connected with my real name. I got an fitting email address and thought about a first (Martin, obviously) and a family name, too, so I can pass most registrations. Took me about half an hour to set it all up, you should try that too.

How did you achieve that and what about sites like archive.org?

Also, have you considered going a "middle path" where you are searchable but no info comes up besides your name and face? With how things seem to be evolving I lean torwards a "grey man" strategy because some day you will be suspicious by not being searchable online. At least that's what I kinda fear.

I'm lucky that I share a first and last name with someone who is a successful Social Media influencer, also with a professional photographer, a journalist and and an amateur model (Haha, I wonder if that is enough for an Internet detective to work out my name!). This helps because they all have very searchable content online.

I've tried to strike a balance between anonymity and retaining 'placeholder' accounts with my name. I can't rule out a change of heart in the future.

I removed all data from facebook manually by using Social Book Posts Manager. Clunky but it works. It took about a week of different sessions to allow it to work through all of my facebook content. My FB account still exists but is effectively private, all the settings are as locked down as I can make them.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

I deleted all my tweets manually and set my account to private where possible.

I stripped my LinkedIn profile back to basics manually because I didn't really use it anyway. I don't need it, I have a job I'm happy with that pays the mortgage, I don't feel the need to network myself.

I removed the content from my website (<firstname><lastname>.co.uk). I left it displaying my domain registrar's holding page because I figured Google would down-rate that. It appears to have worked because it never appears in search results for either or both of my names.

My domain is a .co.uk so I've taken advantage of Nominet's anonymity service and no details are visible via public WHOIS.

I haven't asked Archive.org to remove the archived versions of my site, if someone knows about it, they could look there. At present I don't actually have any publicly accessible storage to place the robots.txt so I keep procrastinating about it.

I submitted a removal request to 192.com which is a site that publishes UK telephone directory data. They honour removal requests.

I occasionally google myself (especially from new devices and new locations/IP addresses to see if Google is presenting different results for different searchers) to check.

Thank you for your extensive reply!

Be careful. You might leave a trace of yourself by searching for yourself on new, and perhaps even non-trusted devices.

Streisand effect came to mind, too.

You've changed the subject slightly, away from searchability and online presence/self promotion, to tracking by Big Brother.

I concede that Google track me everywhere, I can't stop it so I live with it. I aim for a managed level of visibility.

I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin to reduce some of my digital footprint.

You can throw Google in a container but it comes with its own annoyances.

If I was an online ghost I would never get hired. In my line of work you need a CV with publications. While you become a public figure in the process of publishing papers, its actually proof of work vs. trying to talk about your proprietary little thing you worked on at company X that you aren't really allowed to go into specifics about, or doing an interview exam on one tangential problem you may or may not ever encounter in the job like you are in undergrad again. If the recruiter wants to see what I can do, they can just read what I wrote, and ask me for clarification rather than total explanation.

Another massive benefit of being a public face is that collaboration is now possible. Two people in the same Uber pool ride in SV could be struggling with the exact same issue and have no idea that the other person exists because the CS field is closed off and proprietary for the sake of shareholder profit. Think of all the investment and engineering by a half a dozen companies towards the same exact goal of a self driving car. Imagine if all those NDAs were ripped up, and every engineer met up at a conference, gave talks, held poster sessions, troubleshooted common problems, set up meetings, emails, collaborations, joint efforts, shared resources and data, etc.

But then, of course, no company will be able to 'win' and dominate market share and print money for the shareholders.

As someone who's full name is unique on earth, this is nearly impossible for me.

Except that makes it super easy for anyone to fill that void. Someone who you've pissed off could write some trash about you and it would become the #1 result on google.

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