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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I'm old enough to remember when the general advice was to never use your real name on the internet. Then social media came along and suddenly that changed.

And now we're seeing the results of the naive trust we placed in these platforms as well as our fellow human beings. As a people we need to get back to drawing a hard line between our Private and Public selves.

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First thing I told my kids when they were old enough to start communicating with friends over the internet: don't use your real name, don't tell anyone your last name, don't tell anyone your address.

It's probably time to reiterate this...

And then they go to school. School makes then use their full legal names to create an account and Google or Microsoft or Apple, store all their school activity under that. Then you explain to the school why it's not a good idea, but they say, they have to because, etc.

Most important: don't give your phone number to companies! It is used to link your activity across sites and apps.

You of course can't get an Apple ID, a Google Account, a Twitter username, a Discord account, et c without giving a phone number. There are several good reasons for that but the biggest one is for identification.

That was the benefit of early account creation with several of those companies. Spam email address is the only link. Twitter and Facebook keep harassing me for a phone number but nah, I’d rather not use it.

Of course it would be trivial to link to my IP, but I’m not going to make it easy for them.

Discord does not require a phone number, just verifying an email address.

I just discovered yesterday that while the Discord itself does not require it in all cases, certain servers with the highest restrictions can require that you have a phone number verified with Discord in order to post.

Try it from a VPN. It requires a phone number. If you do it from Tor, it requires a phone number and like 27 captchas.

When companies like Discord or Google seem to let you create an account without a phone number, what that really means is that they already figured out your phone number based on your IP, HTTP ETAGs, or browser fingerprint.

Try it again using TorBrowser, or Tails on a VPN.

I've begun to think that our private and public selves should be legally distinct entities using a corporation with a screen name and keep your personal identity for offline use only.

You are 10 years too late. Remember when Google plus was arguing that you had to use your "real name", endless arguments about that, very few for why this was a good thing. There were some naive claims that it would lead to some mysterious social pressure for people to behave if their real name was used.

In today's world, the ever more ubiquitous tracking should give everyone pause. Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Do you want to have any privacy? Then you need to do that. I don't hold any hope for the legislative bodies to succeed in blocking this. Not at the US federal level at least - there may be hope for California.

> Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary.

Is this even enough at this point? I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to somehow deanonymize these people.

And even if it is enough, is it worth doing if it makes you look like a suspicious person and attracts NSA attention?

Yeah, that's a good point. Anonymity relies on everyone using Tor as well so they all look the same. If there's just one weird guy using Tor it's easy to single him out.

Indeed.

Unfortunately there are huge moves to decreasing privacy going through the legislatures and via ad/social technologies.

You'd basically have to leave everything behind and start over, change your name, move and leave no forwarding address and forget your friends; thats a non-starter for most people.

It's surprising how many sites don't even let you edit your name after you've input the data. I've seen this on a lot of them as I slog through my password manager to scrub and delete every account that I can.

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