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I don’t accept the author’s trade-offs. I can have plenty of gratification and personalization on free services like reddit, HN, and Wikipedia, all under semi-d

I don’t accept the author’s trade-offs. I can have plenty of gratification and personalization on free services like reddit, HN, and Wikipedia, all under semi-disposable pseudonyms which accumulate data, but which I don’t feel threaten my personal privacy much, if at all. It’s Facebook and Google’s fussiness about real names and identities (and desire to become something akin to ultra-invasive credit ratings agencies / the next Equifax) that’s the new part about commercial surveillance, and that creates these trade offs.

tabeth 9y ago
You're mistaken if you think pseudonyms somehow will protect your privacy. Your privacy will be compromised. It's inevitable.
- pinebox 9y ago
  If pseudonyms don't matter, why does Facebook have such a hard-on for collecting real names (even trying to get people's friends to rat them out)? No, you can still do a lot with compartmentalization. Throwing in the towel just because "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero" is just looking at the glass as half empty.
  - tabeth 9y ago
    I didn't say they didn't matter. I said they won't protect your privacy, which they won't. Also, what's up with the fictitious quote?
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      > Also, what's up with the fictitious quote? The quote's real (Chuck Palahniuk did write it, after all); the character who said it was just fictitious. They were just using it to say that you're being overly pessimistic.
indubitable 9y ago
Pseudonyms are a fun one. Check out snoopsnoo.com . It's a site that using extremely primitive language parsing to create a profile of Reddit users. It's absolutely unbelievable how much we give away about ourselves when the bits and pieces are collected. Factor in linguistic analysis and I think it's safe to say that the privacy enabled by pseudonyms rapidly approaches 0 as your length of time using that pseudonym grows, even if only on a single site.
wakkaflokka 9y ago
I always felt safe posting under pseudonyms, but then realized even if everything else is 100% private, somebody could theoretically use stylometry to identify me based on my posting style.

tabeth 9y ago

You're mistaken if you think pseudonyms somehow will protect your privacy. Your privacy will be compromised. It's inevitable.

pinebox 9y ago
If pseudonyms don't matter, why does Facebook have such a hard-on for collecting real names (even trying to get people's friends to rat them out)? No, you can still do a lot with compartmentalization. Throwing in the towel just because "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero" is just looking at the glass as half empty.
- tabeth 9y ago
  I didn't say they didn't matter. I said they won't protect your privacy, which they won't. Also, what's up with the fictitious quote?
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    > Also, what's up with the fictitious quote? The quote's real (Chuck Palahniuk did write it, after all); the character who said it was just fictitious. They were just using it to say that you're being overly pessimistic.

indubitable 9y ago

Pseudonyms are a fun one. Check out snoopsnoo.com . It's a site that using extremely primitive language parsing to create a profile of Reddit users. It's absolutely unbelievable how much we give away about ourselves when the bits and pieces are collected. Factor in linguistic analysis and I think it's safe to say that the privacy enabled by pseudonyms rapidly approaches 0 as your length of time using that pseudonym grows, even if only on a single site.

wakkaflokka 9y ago

I always felt safe posting under pseudonyms, but then realized even if everything else is 100% private, somebody could theoretically use stylometry to identify me based on my posting style.