One who is followed me from website to website for years delights in giving out my personal information.

I pretty much ignore them. One, however, tried contacting some of my clients to tell them what a horrible person I am. They called me to let me know. They even had caller ID information. My attorney gave that number a call and followed up with a cease and desist letter. That bullshit ended. That person thought he was anonymous, too. He was wrong, and stupidly so.

The funny thing is that it's really easy to find out who I am. That's deliberate. I don't care. It's irrelevant to my life.

To get information about me. She actually traveled to a different state in order to do this. He of course at some point while in recovery for various issues got all remorseful. A short time later he accidentally OD'd.

your ex is doing OK.

All my information about her came from either the ex boyfriend who told me about the little rendezvous or website owners who contacted me about this person because they begin to sweat about their liability.

Fucking a, some people have some shit seriously wrong with them.

I hope they have no idea who you are or where you are...people like that are creepy X 1000.

Sh e's even bragged about knowing my ex boyfriend except I don't think she knew that I knew what transpired between them.

They invest all their time in other peoples (who don't give two shits about them or even know they exist) lives and so have none themselves and are hollow inside. Hollow Men and Women.

and I only post things I don't mind the whole world knowing. Sites like DU are a little different. If someone really, really wanted to do the detective work, I guess they could track someone down here, but I subscribe to the big ocean, small fish theory. The chances they'd bother doing that with any one individual are pretty small.

who don't like other people on the Innertubes. Sometimes, they go on a digging expedition and broadcast what they find. Apparently, it's not very difficult to find out who someone is if they post a lot online. People often slip up in subtle ways, it seems. Again, anonymity is pretty much a myth. If someone really wants to find out who someone is, it's not too difficult, really.

But you're right. It's ridiculous to think you have anonymity. I bet they can find the AM hackers, too. Even the DarkNet leaves a trail.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Precision and concision. That's the game.[/center][/font][hr]

I'm sure there are a lot of folks in a cold sweat over it. Stuff gets real sometimes. Good luck to them, but it was all voluntary stuff. You make your bed...

to WCCO 830 here in St. Paul, MN. Every half hour, there's CBS national and fresh local news. The rest of the time, it's one sort of news talk or another. Reasonably well-balanced.

I don't always listen, but it's always on. I'm old, and apparently old-fashioned. It's the background noise of my life. I hear the big news and what's going on in the Twin Cities.

Ashley Madison? Meh. Not interested.

I am course am very easy to figure out. I've also had to develop a thick skin. Oh well.... With my book out, I've created a real separation between my politics and the gardening stuff on places like Facebook and Twitter. So far, mostly so good!

as to whether or not I sign up on a dating website.

People can't be arrested or extraordinarily renditioned based on membership of a dating website.

I don't have a choice of letting or not letting the government to retain my phone call meta data, my internet correspondence, and my email. If the government decided that I was a dissident, they can extraordinarily rendition me if they go on a witch hunt by sifting through all of that data.

Dismissing the threat inherent to the government spying on citizens without consent and in violation the Constitution because someone chose to register on a dating website that got hacked is like comparing a 5 Star hotel to a refugee camp because both provide soap.

It's about people voluntarily signing up for things and thinking they are anonymous. We're all in multiple government databases under our real names. Social Security and the IRS are the largest. We're all in those two.

This thread is not about the government in any way. Please reread the OP.

There are several temporary email services available that will give you an email address to use to sign up for things that disappears after a set amount of time. So you could use one of those emails to sign up for a service that requires an email and never use it again without any personal info tied to it at all.

But you are right anything you do online should be treated as public no matter what the site you are using tells you.

I've had the same one for over 15 years.

Couldn't care less really. If someone wants to rummage through my info more power to them I guess. Some people are worried about it though so I just wanted to throw that info out there.

We have financial trails we leave everywhere. Cameras filming us everywhere. Our cell phones broadcasting our location everywhere. Anonymity is mostly a myth. We could, of course, have a massive debate about what this means and if it is healthy for our society, but the fact remains that unless you are some rare person living far off the grid, you don't have all that much anonymity anyway.

Even if you personally refrain from posting online, chances are it won't change all that much either. I'm continuously amazed at what Facebook seems to know about my connections given that I rarely post anything revealing and have a small group of select friends/family added. Doesn't matter. Others share so much that Facebook is able to make an astonishingly good profile anyway.

Anonymity is indeed a myth.

We do that willingly. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm really talking about people using made-up names online and thinking that their real identities can't be connected to those fake names.

The reality is that it's not true, really. If you have a screen name on DU or some other place, odds are that you think you're online anonymously. You're probably not. Most often, you've provided an email address for verification purposes when you signed up. That's what the Ashley Madison members did. Whether it's actually used for verification, as many sites do, it's part of the data collected by the website.

In most cases, websites sell those email names to marketing firms, and the result is spam emails. Some sites don't sell that information, but a lot, if not most, do. In the Ashley Madison situation, their data about customers was hacked and then published. If anyone thinks that the typical discussion site or other websites they use are secure with their customer data, it's a mistake. That data is very rarely secure, and it's of interest to lots of people.

Once someone has someone's email address, it's usually very easy to find more information about the person behind the address. Anyone can test this by Googling their full email address, in quotes. The results will come as a surprise to many people. Generally, you'll find that your email address is tied to your real name, and the search may well reveal a lot more than that.

Some people use disposable or "anonymous" email addresses. Those also may not actually provide much protection. Do the search.

But wait, there's more. People often use the same screen names at multiple places. People often discuss the same thing at multiple places. People often reveal scraps of personal information online, here and there. In a lot of cases, it's not difficult for a clever person to find out a great deal in a couple of hours of online work about someone. Even with just a screen name. If that person has an actual email address, it's much easier.

Bottom line is that if you think your "anonymous" activities on the Internet are really anonymous, there's a very strong chance that you're wrong. Even if you're right, though, you're one hack away from losing that anonymity. It's really a myth.

I agree completely. We really do have to assume that what we post online will be public and permanent. The Internet never forgets. And you are also so right that it's probably far easier to piece a profile of us together than we think. Things to think about and keep in mind.

A couple things, buddy. Certainly, if you're saying shit online that you wouldnt stand behind using your real name, (or, say, signing up online to cheat on your spouse) you may very well be setting yourself up for embarassment down the road. That said, anonymity is a good, important principle and there are a fuckton of reasons why it should be respected and even valued in online discourse.

And while there are certainly holes in almost any anonymity scheme- (not to mention the fact that anyone verbose and opinionated usually makes it fairly easy to figure out who they are, after a time, something I reconciled myself to vis a vis DU a long time ago) the email verification is NOT generally a dealbreaker in that regard. Anyone with a modicum of savvy so inclined can use one of a myriad of anonymous, disposable email address sites, like mailinator.com, to circumvent any danger to anyonymity by an email requirement.

which creates a new personna for subscribers which hides the real one. Criteria: Boring stuff, videos which freeze up, promises of a new picture of Kardashian's butt, but getting a buffalo butt, how-tos on washing dishes, test patterns, etc. People would be too bored to "out" anyone.

a database that only allows SQL statements from database admins, and requires runs of stored procedures for anything/everything else (with checks for SQL injection within the parameters) goes a long way. I'd be curious if they did that.

enquiring lawyers will want to know

but the question I have is why do people put up with the vapid privacy laws in this country to begin with? Why are people so willing to just shrug their shoulders and accept tit?

have nothing they want to hide, really. We willingly give up our personal information to just about all comers. We shrug at surveillance cameras just about everywhere we go. Most people don't care. That's why.

One advantage of that lack of privacy shows up every time some criminal's face shows up on security camera video. Now, you'd never recognize the person if you saw him or her later, but the people who know him or her recognized the face immediately. What happens next is that one of them says, "That asshole owes me $50 and won't pay it back" or "That SOB dissed my girlfriend." Then they call 911 and tell them who the person in the video is and where he or she lives.

Works a treat, it does.

The "I have nothing to hide" crowd tends to be conformist, and the downside of that is they also tend to believe in the tyranny of the majority. They are more likely to be right-of-center politically on social issues.

And that "advantage" of having an alleged criminal's face show up on security footage isn't worth the breach of anonymity for everyone else who wandered in front of that camera. Being out in public used to involve transitory interactions but now every nose-pick and crotch-adjustment is preserved in perpetuity for ridicule. In such a world it's best to self-edit actions and never voice nonconforming thoughts.

You want that world, you're welcome to it. Just don't pretend that it falls within a liberal ideology.

nose picking or crotch adjustment image and resulting ridicule. Maybe you could link to some.