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Comment by wayoutthere | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I changed my gender, first and last name, e-mail address, phone number and moved states and they still connected me. It doesn’t help when every company you have an account with sells your information to the ad networks and DMPs. Ending 3rd party cookies should help to wind this down however.

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I am sorry to hear about your pain. No idea why you are being downvoted. I also have a transsexual experience. It goes a lot deeper than 3rd party cookies and ad networks. Private companies like Lexis Nexis have vast databases of aggregated and collated personal identity information. That is only one place that shady companies like those people search sites get their info from. This is to say nothing of credit, bank reports, voter rolls, and if you got a new job that used certain firms to do a background check on you. It should be illegal. I plan to use Privacy Duck although it is expensive ($1000 per year).

Wow, that's an impressive amount of change.

I'm curious how you think you were linked. Also, how you have identified that you were successfully linked?

Perhaps you still have the same social media accounts somewhere? Perhaps you used your same PC you'd formerly used when creating new ones? Perhaps your friends merely updated their phone's contact information for you rather than deleting the contact and adding new ones?

I’ve been off social media for a very long time; kind of a hipster about it :)

I wasn’t able to identify where it came from, but I do suspect it’s the latter — which is really hard to deal with because it’s other people leaking info about you. But the same could have happened with facial recognition at an ATM or checkout.

Personally, I’ve accepted that being an American in 2021 just means being under constant surveillance. The fantasies of going off-grid will run into the realities of your human relationships.

It's sad that your last point is the current state of affairs. My kids (in their 20's) have a completely differ idea of privacy, and are really ignorant of how much data exists on them.

It's an interesting side effect of our need to have constant identifiers on everyone that legal name/gender changes are so complicated. It's certainly not the only reason, or even the biggest. But it does seem like our society is particularly hostile to people changing anything that can be used as a primary identifier.

You mention contact linking being a possible cause of advertisers figuring out your new address, but it also wouldn't surprise me if at some point during the legal process credit industries just got notified about it. Although if that was the case you'd think that advertisers would have had the courtesy to use your correct name when sending junk mail, so... shrug.

It's a weird system that is so ridiculously good at tracking people, but still messes up so many basic details.

The hostility would likely predate modern government tracking systems and bueracracies. While going from Jimmy Brown to Jim Brown wouldn't raise much of an eyebrow (head of your household now - fair enough) but going by a different name in every town would raise suspicion of being a spy, serial con artist, fugitive, or other sort of scoundrel. Bypassing "means of trust" like word about you gets viewed with suspicion even without rationalization of rules imposed by might maked right.

Name changes seem to not have been frowned upon generally if they had significance. Often they were recorded as part of a rise of status whether formally like say becoming pope or a Norse deed name style like being known as Shieldbreaker because you struck the blow that split a foe's shield in two.

As for tracking - many buggy but functional systems linger at good enough for generations with a weirdly stable whole. Even if you can get a "NULL" vanity plate you shouldn't unless you like taking the chance of receiving every ticket for cars without plates and having to dig your way out of that mess.

> It doesn’t help when every company you have an account with sells your information

That may or may not be the case. It's enough to have a friend of yours who (unknowingly) posts a picture on FB with "Me with X. He/She changed his/her name and move to ...". The chances are you'll never discover where the "leak" comes from.

If I may ask, who found you, and how did you figure it out? Do you have anything you'd have done differently to avoid it?

I started getting junk mail under my old name at a new address. No idea how they figured it out. I wasn’t explicitly trying to avoid being tracked — I got a new job in another state at the same time my legal name change went through — but I was surprised at how quickly they were able to connect the dots.

Same SSN or other identifier I would guess.

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