Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Dangers of being online

Posted in Computers & Technology, Family by Elliott Back on February 11th, 2005.

My mother feels that it’s quite dangerous to have personal information, such as your birthdate, name and address, etc, online. Well, domain registration “requires” it, as does your resume and a number of other things. How do you all balance privacy and your online life?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 11th, 2005 at 5:19 pm and is tagged with name and address, domain registration, resume. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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    Tis what my mum says all the time.. I guess there always should be a precaution about how much information to reveal, but you can't be nitpicky and say I won't sign up or do anything online that might have ask me to reveal my address et al. Life is full of risks.. you gotta take some, with a bit of care.
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    And I thought I was the only one with such a mum :p

    To balance privacy, I hold different "personas", each for a different layer of trust I maintain for the destinary. I have my personal information and email to whom I only pass to trusted sources (close friends, university, paypal, etc.).

    Then there's another persona with its own email account that I pass on to all questionable sources. Anything where I register, I give an alternate email address, whose intent is to get spammed like heck. I only check it for those "click me to complete registration" mails. If you search every aspect of this persona, be it the email address or the linked information, it will never be traced back to me.
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    @Julien, don't you won't that there's still access logs by IP that connect the two persona?
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    Yes, true. But usually in order to get them they would have to contact server operators, and those operators would have to divulge the private information. Even if it was one crooked server operator that wanted my info for god knows what, he/she still wouldn't be able to link that IP to anything else without first getting some other logs with which to correlate it.

    None of my "persona's" can hide from the proper authorities with the correct credentials, but it will keep the freaks from finding out my personal info.
 

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