  > I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an
  > abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search
  > carefully, but in today's hostile internet I see this kind
  > of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect
  > to have it respected.

Without judging whether the goal is good or not, I will gently point out that your current approach doesn't seem to be effective. A Google search for "BoppreH" turned up several results on the first page with what appears to be your full name, along with other results linking to various emails that have been associated with that name. Results include Github commits, mailing list archives, and third-party code that cited your Github account as "work by $NAME".

As a purely practical matter -- again, not going into whether this is how things should be, merely how they do be -- it is futile to want the internet as a whole to have a concept of privacy, or to respect the concept of a "digital personal space". If your phone number or other PII has ever been associated with your identity, that association will be in place indefinitely and is probably available on multiple data broker sites.

The best way to be anonymous on the internet is to be anonymous, which means posting without any name or identifier at all. If that isn't practical, then using a non-meaningful pseudonym and not posting anything personally identifiable is recommended.

ChrisMarshallNY

I gave up anonymity. I just learned to lean into taking control of my ID. Some time ago, I realized that there's no way for me to participate online, without things being attributed to me.

I learned this, by setting up a Disqus ID. I wanted to comment on a blog post, and started to set up an account.

After I started the process, it came back, with a list of random posts, from around the Internet (and some, very old), and said "Are these yours? If so, would you like to associate them with your account?"

I freaked. Many of them were outright troll comments (I was not always the haloed saint that you see before you) that I had sworn were done anonymously. They came from many different places (including DejaNews). I have no idea how Disqus found them.

Every single one of them was mine. Many, were ones that I had sworn were dead and buried in a deep grave in the mountains.

Needless to say, I do not have a Disqus ID.

Being non-anonymous means that I need to behave myself, online. I come across as a bit of a stuffy bore, but I suspect my IRL persona is that way, as well.

That's OK.

alcover

  > some, very old
  > I had sworn were done anonymously

How in the hell did they do it ? I presume you changed IP and user-agent many times over since then... How ?

charrondev

With a sticky fingerprint. I’ve built a system like this for managing trolls. You fingerprint the user and associate it with an IP. There are multiple mechanisms that can contribute to the fingerprint (cookie, user agent, supported media codecs, etc. See https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprints for an example implementation).

Then if another user registers with the same fingerprint we link the accounts together.

In our case the whole thing is also requiring human moderator input to actually keep the whole thing going though.

CSSer

Your link 404s. I believe this is what you meant to include: https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs.

There is also a premium verson: https://fingerprint.com/