Hacker News Reader

Just beings a devils advocate for a second - People exposing personal details to the public can be very bad and make them victims of untold numbers of what should be crimes. We know this from just the data and privacy nightmare unfolding before us. It's normal to romanticism the past, but there's a certain comfort in security with less of clear open blogs.

View on HN

Certainly for some people. But for many who are on the web professionally, it can be hard to separate professional and personal identities. And especially once people are public in other ways, such as by owning homes and, at least until recently (sometimes) having a landline, it doesn't take a private investigator to link some facts about someone to a great deal of information--at least some of which is often public by law.

A great deal of the mainstream Internet was not anonymous/pseudonymous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com