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Comment by nvr219 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big use-different-username-for-every-website enthusiast. It makes some things difficult but for me it's worth it.

I guess with password managers, this is easier than ever

Even if you used the same username on different accounts, you should have different passwords anyway.

I'm pretty sure they meant that using a password manager means you don't have to remember the _username_ for every site.

I've started to just generate a 10-char alphanumerical string with the password generator feature and use that as the username on new accounts, starting to update them retroactively, too (by scrapping the old account and making a new one).

Thats great, then you can use the same for your password.

Really, why is that?

because if you get your account compromised on one site/forum because of lax security on their end, you don't want all your accounts compromised.

How will your accounts be compromised if they are all different? A key is no good if you don't know which lock it leads to.

Because it might be tied back to your email account or some other common denominator. Using different usernames is good for dox attacks like this but doesn't necessarily help you if your email is compromised. So you need different passwords (AND MFA!!!!)

What if I use more than one email?

But people are commonly lazy, and you'd find that most people who don't even consider resistance to deanonymization as a concern will just use the same name on many sites.

Use the battery horse staple tool to generate usernames.

Or don’t, I’m not your mom.

isn’t it:

`correct horse battery staple`

just wondering how memorable that technique is.

edit: indeed

https://xkcd.com/936/

Speaking personally, I kind of want people to know I'm the same person in different places. I do realize this is a terrible idea from a privacy perspective, and probably a lot of other perspectives. But I think a bunch of people want to use the net this way.

Agree. There's a possibly flawed but possibly real notion of reputation or brand or eminence. Patio11 of course comes to mind :).

It's only bad from a privacy perspective if you are sharing things you don't want linked together or are sharing things that can be unintentionally linked back to your real life. If you are the same username across multiple sites and you want those linked together then that's just branding.

Using the same username may allow you to manually poison your own profile to make your data less useful than a shadow profile generated through stylometry

I do this. I have a handle I've been using for 20+ years (not this one and nothing on HN) and I lie about stupid shit rather frequently.

I also also create one-off usernames in addition to my 'permanent' name. That way everybody sees the permanent name and assumes I'm too stupid/ignorant to use different names, so nobody ever suspects the other names are me. (Using different emails because I do the same thing with email addresses and - when I can afford it - phone numbers).

> It's only bad from a privacy perspective if you are sharing things you don't want linked together or are sharing things that can be unintentionally linked back to your real life

You must live in a location where you have very little fear of political oppression. If you're an Iranian or something these days the situation is very different.

Count me in as one of those people.

I use the same username (which is my real name as well) pretty much everywhere.

I use recognisable usernames in places (like here) where I'm fine with my comments being linked to my real name, and less obvious ones without explicitly hiding it places where I'd prefer my comments don't show up in Google searches for my name (e.g. Reddit - if you trawl through my reddit profile, linking it to my name is easy, and it wouldn't be a problem if you found it, but I don't get a bunch of reddit comments when I Google my name), and then totally separate user names for anything I actually want to be anonymous for.

My situation is a bit unusual in that I almost certainly have a globally unique name (my last name is a corruption of an uncommon name in Norway; said corruption occurred two places independently, and there are less than 500 people with that last name in Norway, and probably about the same in the US, and to date I've seen no indication of anyone combining it with my first name), my first name plus last initial is also unusual enough that I only rarely can't get it as a username.

I've started doing this too. I use DuckDuckGo's email forwarder and they provide random email addresses to hide your real one. Every service I sign up with now has a random email address and what ever the email address is that becomes my username. Couple this with a password manager it works well. If I ever lose access to the password manager I am screwed.

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