You're Not As Anonymous As You Think You Are.

Earlier this afternoon I got sucked into a blog vortex. It's kind of like the Youtube vortex, where you click aimlessly for hours and suddenly find half your day is missing and you're watching a video of a hamster trying to get jiggy with a grapefruit and you have no idea why... Er. I mean theoretically. That's never happened to me. Ever.

Moving on...

So, clicking my way through random blogs, I ended up reading this epic and seriously fucked up tale of some guy who fell in love with a girl who's parents were completely fucked in the head- And after 16 installments of the tale he left it hanging! There was no ending!

So I did a bad, bad thing which I am only admitting to because it serves a point that not a lot of people seem to pay attention to- You're Not As Anonymous As You Think You Are.

Now, I'm not going to link to this guy's blog, given that he's a Christian and I'm not sure how thrilled he'd be to be linked to a kinkster's blog, so I'm just going to call him Jimmy Dean (this is an homage to my favorite brand of breakfast sausage, BTW).

When writing his epic tale of woe, Jimmy D. was very careful to not use any names. Not even made up ones. He referred tot he girl as "my Ex," or typed her name (and all other names) out like this: *****. There were no pictures, nothing really identifying in the whole blog. Just his name.

That's it, the only thing he ever wrote in the entire 16 separate blogs was his name and that he worked in the music industry.


And maybe my Google Fu is stronger than the average interwebs user, but I doubt that. I'm not some sort of genius hacker, I cannot write code, and half the time I can barely get my favorite online time-wasting games to work right... But I found him. And through  him I found her name. With her name I found her family (who he maligned pretty badly in the blog), and eventually I found my way to her Facebook page.

All told, it took me half an hour.

30 minutes and all that anonymity was gone.

I doubt I was the first person to try to learn how the story ended, and I doubt I'll be the last- And at least with me I won't pester them, I won't send a message or stalk them or invade their privacy any more than I have. Case closed and I'm content.

But this is something that I don't think many folks think about online- That with the right clues, clues you might not mean to give out, someone can find you. Hell, someone could find me (I don't know why they'd want to, but they could). Someone with a much more lax moral compass than I possess could take that info and FIND you.

So when I get on Fet and visit random profiles and I see people who use their real names, who post their phone number, who air explicit non-consent fantasies on a website where a great many people don't seem to understand the concept of consent in all we do... It worries me. All it takes is one person with bad intentions and basic Google skills and then Dog only knows what might happen.

So be careful, OK?
You're not as anonymous as you think you are.