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Notes -
How much should I care about being-opaque-to-casual-inspection level "opsec", given that I don't really care about actually being unidentifiable?
So I have this username on TheMotte. I have another that I use elsewhere. The other one is extremely easy to connect to my real life identity, to the point that I treat it like posting under my real name. I don't have the sort of spicy opinions that would make me a serious target for cancellation, but there's some stuff I've posted here that would probably have some social repercussions if people IRL knew that I'd written it. This is largely why I picked a fresh username here in the first place.
I'm under no illusions that it's impossible to get [dovetailing] -> [real identity] with some sleuthing. (I'm curious how hard it is, but there's no way it's even close to impossible.) What I'm a bit more concerned about is getting from a casual search of [real identity] to [dovetailing]. This has led me to divide up my posts across various places, and not cross-post links here to things I've written elsewhere, or share the same writing in multiple places. However, it strikes me that this may be an incorrect amount of paranoia -- not nearly enough to hinder the [dovetailing] -> [real identity] pathway for a serious inquirer, but more than makes sense if all I care about is someone I know personally, or a (potential) employer, casually searching my real name or my other username and getting my posts here.
So... what do you all think?
I think it's good general opsec to change handles over the medium to long term (6 months to 2+years depending on your risk tolerance). It's not just about posting spicy opinions, but the fact that the internet is forever and you don't know what advances in technology (AI scraping), the social landscape (authoritarians getting into power), and even your personal views and desire for privacy changing in the future. Swapping handles and being reasonably careful about dropping too much identifying information is just a good practice to get into and well worth the 5% of the time you'd like to share something but can't because it might let people/AI connect the dots.
My handle here is too similar to one I used on another forum, but I've since used a tool to overwrite past comments to cover my tracks. Even so I also wonder if I'm not being paranoid enough.
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