Comment by ggggtez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggggtez | Hacker News Reader

1) Promptly stop saying anything interesting under your real name. Opt out of all social media except to post messages like "Congratulations on the baby!". This will prevent you from making any enemies who know your real name, and reduce the chances anyone will want to doxx you.

2) Start adopting new pseudonyms. Use a different one on every site, and a password keeper to help you stay logged in. If you happen to forget, don't worry. Treat every account as disposable. These are not "you". This is not "your brand". These are merely tools that allow to into a walled garden party wearing the mask of anonymity.

3) Do not mix your two online personas. Keep your politics, jokes, and personality in your pseudononymous accounts. Keep your boring safe opinions and pictures of dogs in your primary account. Don't talk about anything in your real life in your pseudonymous accounts, even the weather. Reserve that kind of discussion for in-person friends only. If you make a mistake, just delete the account and make a new one.

To add on - having an account under your real name that's safe and boring is essential. Some jobs and visa applications require you to disclose your social media, and having a safe account to show there is necessary.

What if you dont have social media accounts? Surely you can just tell these jobs/visa applications you don't have any.

That stands out as a red flag in this day and age, really. Having a simple account with your real name that has a few dog pics is far more stealthy than claiming you really don't interact with social media at all.

Do you have a source that says that that stands out as a red flag? And in which countries?

As far as I know, only the USA has gone so far as to ask for social media accounts for some visas. (I might be out of date)

It's just my personal experience. I've had funny looks given to me when I say I'm not on facebook, and when I was off whatsapp for a brief while people refused to believe I had a smartphone but didn't use whatsapp.

E: I'm speaking more about job applications. The US Visa application requirement is of course already being litigated, and hopefully will soon not be a requirement any more.

Ah, so it's just a story you are telling yourself and us.

That makes a lot more sense!

I have literally been asked for Whatsapp and Facebook details on my job applications.

My mother's friend was told to give up her Facebook password for a job at the police station. She accepted the terms, for some reason. This was for an administrative-type job at a police station that did not involve police work or any kind.

So, yeah, it absolutely does happen and to different (sometimes frightening) degrees.

No one can give you a list of countries where this rule will apply tomorrow.

I had to provide them for a Chinese visa last year.

I have no Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or anything else, am.i that much of an outlier?

This depends on your age group and country of origin I would think. If you are between the age of 16 and 30 and in a western first world country, then yes - you would be an outlier. If you were 60 -70 years old from Mongolia, then no.

Although if celticninja is a 60-70yo from Mongolia, they are presumably an outlier for posting here.

I never fail to find it odd that, in an industry once notorious for people with introversion and and lack of social aptitude, vigorous participation in social media has now become all but compulsory. The mundanes really have taken over.

No it doesn't.

Most people are not on Twitter or Insta the only possible 'odd one' would be Facebook, and you can say you deleted your account a while ago.

That leaves not much.

Really? I've been at the same job since college and they just had my transcript, in-person interview, and drug test results. Social media doesn't come up in any interviews. Maybe HR searches for obvious red flags via Google, but not that I'm aware of. I don't work in software though. Is it really that common when applying for software positions?

It almost certainly depends on your location and the industry, plus your relative skill as well.

I suppose if people keep repeating this, then it might be a thing with a given group of people who keep repeating it to each other. In that case, good luck hiring people like me or that other person here who clearly thinks it's wrong to think like this.

I can assure you, our value over time exceeds that of dogmatic thinkers. That's because, by the time you believe something, it's no longer true and we know that to be a fact before you do because we don't buy into this story.

Probably not a bad idea to have "dummy" accounts but that's something that would need maintenaince to be convincing. When it comes to prospective employers, a more robust strategy is to work toward developing skills and abilities sufficient to provide you with enough options that you don't ever need to bend over for an employer.

Obviously, not viable for a new grad but it should be a goal. My career has been long with many failures but also notable successes and certain rare, valuable skills. In one recent case I was resigning my position to take some time off and do other things. I was senior, only a couple levels under the CEO at a very large F500 multi-national. The company really wanted me to stay on for a year or two more.

I generally liked the work and the people and they offered even more money to stay but for me one of the issues was that the inevitable HR policy creep was adding stuff like mandatory training sessions that were getting tedious and annoying. Basically, liked the work but hated the bullshit. So we made a novel arrangement. Any mandatory policy at the company requiring my attendance was optional for me. In the case of "specifically mandated and enforced compliance with a relevant government regulation" my boss had to explain why and just ask me. (I'm not unreasonable and there are a few SEC and state regs that they really can't just ignore).

This worked out very well and was a small but meaningful concession that really cost them nothing.

One loophole here is that statistical/machine learning analytics tools may still be able to correlate these posts as coming from the same writer.

We should probably also use a tool that just converts our posts into a generic style and remove any personal touches like the usual vocabulary, expressions, punctuation styles someone might use. Is there anything like that out there?

I tried changing my writing style on my different personas and it is extremely difficult to keep up with. On one I'd never capitalize anything, another I would never use apostrophes, and then I had one that always used the wrong form of they're/their/there or to/too. Despite all those efforts, I could never consistently change my vocabulary and I did have someone call out a post of mine and link it to secondary accounts. I ended up ignoring the allegation and I never heard from the person again.

If there was some service to normalize, or better yet randomize writing styles, I'd love to know about them.

I don’t think you actually need to change the writing style, you just need to make sure that the corpus of writing for each and every identity is small. Then the error bounds on the probability that any particular piece of writing is by the same author as another piece of writing on the internet will be so wide as to effectively make such analysis useless.

Ideally, any site like reddit that allows pseudonymity would have a super lightweight way of creating multiple parallel new usernames for you to post under, with a way for you to see a coherent view of everything your multiple identities have posted, but where to everyone else, each identity looks like a separate user.

easily fixed: google translate your writing through a few languages before back to English

This is what I got with your comment, after going from English > Spanish > German > Vietnamese > Turkish > Chinese (Traditional) and finally back to English:

> Easy to fix: Google translates your text into several languages and then back to English

I'm actually a little surprised it was as close as it is. The form of the sentence has changed, but the meaning is still easy enough to figure out.

EDIT: Avoid adding Esperanto and Latin. That results in this:

> Easy to configure Google translates your text is in English and in other languages

1) Do not immediately use your real name to say funny things. Exit all social media, but "Congratulations baby!" Post a message like. This prevents you from meeting enemies who know your real name and reduces the chances of someone being you.

2) Start adopting a new pen name. Use different content on each site and use the password manager to stay in login. If you forget, don't worry. Treat all accounts as one-time accounts. that is not you. This is not "your brand". These are simply tools for putting on an anonymous mask and attending a walled garden party.

3) Do not mix the two online roles. Save your politics, jokes and personality in a pseudonym account. Keep boring and safe comments and dog pictures in your default account. Anonymous accounts do not talk about the weather in real life. Book such discussions only with family and friends. If you make a mistake, please delete your account and create a new one.

(English > Korean > Chinese > Hindi > English)

Reporter: how did you catch the suspect?

Police: it turned out Google Translate had a record of all their posts!

It's exceedingly simple to correlate posts. I was able to use the stylo[1] R package to identify authors with just 3 tweets (requires testing against suspected authors), with 100% accuracy.

Robin Camille's master's thesis project[2] is one of the tools available to protect yourself against attacks like these. I had the idea to make something like this but learned that she beat me to it during my research phase.

[1] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stylo/stylo.pdf

[2] https://github.com/robincamille/nondescript

2a. Unique usernames per site are essential. Even better if you use common words that will have millions of hits in search engines.

4. Don’t use the same profile picture on multiple sites. Tineye will link them together.

Do people still use Tineye with the advent of Google's reverse image search?

yes google image doesn't do fingerprinting technique anymore, they moved to something that does categorical matching and it isn't that good for exact image matching

This is what I do. I have “work profiles” and for everything else I just come up with a username every few months, leaving behind any “karma” I don’t need.

For example the username of this month for HN is mumblerino.

Yes 'letting go of karma' is definitely a spiritual recommendation, that might very well ironically have the exact same cathartic application in the online social media universe.

It's like we need an 18th century Swami's guidance on how to deal with 21st century woes: 'let go of karma'.

You are hilarious!

The flaw in this is that in 10 years, saying "congratulations on the baby!" might be considered extremely distasteful.

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