Compartmentalizing Your Online Identity
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Post by Rusty
We exist because we have names & numbers that say we do. Ever since we
were grade schoolers responding "here" to morning roll call, we've been
asked over & over to present those official identities that barnacle onto
us. So we forget an essential fact: not everyone needs to know everything
about us. Our natural inclination to share has only accelerated in this
social media-drenched expository society. Even more dangerously, we now
couple this predilection with the nonchalant assertion that, "I have
nothing to hide." Have we internalized bureaucracy's modus operandi,
recording our lives so they can be inspected? I would go so far as to say
we possess a pathological impulse toward transparency, where any hint of
shadow in one's life is automatically considered suspect.
Yes, institutions use the internet for surveillance, but the net is also
where you can successfully fragment your identity into distinct
compartments. By skillfully learning what information to reveal in what
situations, you can freely interact online while reducing the chances for
repercussions IRL.
The best method is also one of the simplest, utilized even in the
pre-internet days of ham radio: adopt a handle. Rather than publicly
broadcasting your given name on every social media account or public
discussion forum or blog post, why not adopt a handle that allows a
separation between your online identity & the one you maintain IRL?
Sometimes folks assume handles are aliases, but they are fundamentally
different. An alias is a forged identity, an attempt to fool others into
thinking that you're someone else. A handle, on the other hand, fools no
one. Everyone knows that a handle stands-in for a person's identity IRL.
Just because everyone uses handles on a site doesn't make it a sketchy den
of criminals. Rather, the widespread use of handles indicates a collective
agreement to not extract extraneous personal data.
For example, I go by Rusty on the Mastodon instance "scholar.social" & my
avatar is Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica album cover. Other folks
in that instance know that I teach writing at a community college, but
they don't my name, my location, or where I teach. However, my obfuscating
handle & avatar don't prevent me from sharing ideas about open educational
resources or mesh-networking or whatever strikes my scholarly interest.
I've built a real community with folks & I don't know their names or
faces. And why have only one handle? Sure I go by Rusty in some places,
but I go by other handles too, ones you'll never know.
Another strategy to consider: avoid giving your identity a central point
of failure. When you tie all your internet activity to a couple of
programs synced on a couple devices, you become remarkably easy to track.
A good example: folks signed up for accounts on the dark web illegal drug
marketplace Silk Road with their work email addresses. By using an easily
traceable email account, these folks obliterated all the anonymity built
into the dark web. Work email for work, drug buying email for drugs.
Should be glaringly apparent, right? Even if you're not indulging in
illegal activity, keeping your internet activity compartmentalized between
different programs will help protect you from corporate & government
surveillance. It also protects you from malicious actors who wish to steal
your identity, sabotage your machines, or dox you.
You can possess a shit-ton of email addresses & procure a shit-ton of
phone numbers & use a shit-ton of web browsers. Why not use different
identity tags for different purposes? For example, when I reserve a hotel
room through Expedia, I don't give Expedia my primary email address. I
know they're just going to fill my inbox with spam & then sell it to data
brokers. So I give them one of my "spam-fucked" addresses that I rarely
check, an account not tied to my real name. After all, when you sign up
for a trash email address, why not make up a cool name like Hans
Vanderrover?
In the end, this post has little to do with anything technical; it's more
about subtle shifts in online behavior that nonetheless can have seismic
consequences. Individuals online should see transparency as a weapon used
against them by data-mining corporations & violence-prone states. Now I'm
not advocating for what internet scholar Robert Gehl has dubbed a
"proactively paranoid" mindset where an individual interprets every online
interaction as a threat that needs to be neutralized. Let's face it: being
consistently paranoid is exhausting & it seriously undermines the
internet's original dream of empowering individuals through
connections.
Instead, I want us to begin to positively value the role of privacy in
our online lives. Sure, as Syrinx noted in the previous post about
Freenet, privacy & anonymity can indeed give refuge to nefarious
shenanigans. However, we need to stop interpreting an individual's
insistence on privacy as a sort of anti-social threat. Privacy grants us
all the space to safely experiment with ideas & ways of life, to better
understand our constantly evolving selves.
