BTW, nothing like a casual doxxing on a public forum to make my point about the need for real privacy controls, and how unsafe lack of anonymity/effective pseud

BTW, nothing like a casual doxxing on a public forum to make my point about the need for real privacy controls, and how unsafe lack of anonymity/effective pseudonymity on the web can make women, in particular, feel. Congratulations, I've changed my G+ photo for the first time since I created the account. Until now, I never felt uncomfortable having a photo of myself there, even though it meant that I had to deal with some small amount of unwelcome comments, and plenty of not-unwelcome flirty comments (which I'm fine with, I'm a flirty person, and I enjoy good banter. I'm not interested in anything more than that, and crude come-ons got deleted immediately, but I didn't mind the occasional complimentary exchange. If I'd had a problem with it, I would have used a different photo, or an image that didn't show my face.) Google Image Search didn't exist at the time that I created my site, and my Flickr account also predated it. You say that "anonymity is only effective if you practice consistent inconsistency" -- but if your goal is a persistent pseudonym which allows for ongoing human interaction over years, you're almost inevitably going to let some type of identifying information slip. Your comment sounds suspiciously like victim-blaming in this case -- I never claimed to be an incredibly tech-savvy privacy specialist, I'm an an ordinary user of multiple online services and social platforms, and while my attempts to create walls between some of those identities may have been inadequate, they should have been respected. I present as the same persistent pseudonym in most places, so it's fairly easy to track me through that method -- but that was deliberate, so that people could recognize my username cross-platform. Since G+ was the one platform where I was doing a lot of public engagement with strangers, I chose a different nym, and deliberately didn't connect those identities. And, again, Google's products broke down those walls -- in this case, inspired by your actions rather than an automated merge, but still a privacy violation powered by Google. No, putting a user's real name into YouTube isn't the whole of the problem. But it's a symptom of the contraction of identity that Google's products are forcing, even if users have actually taken active steps (and many people have taken more steps than I have, including creating multiple Gmail accounts under different identities) to try to protect their identity privacy and to keep their various online identities from merging.