It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a long-running account on any platform can easily be used to build a profile of someone.
Since many discussions on Lemmy and other platforms can often cause someone to write about their job, family, hobbies, where they live (city/community), etc., there’s a lot of concern about non-private post history being used against someone.
Other than using fake names, throwaway emails, etc. are there any other best practices for handling this?
Should we be creating new accounts/profiles every once in a while?
I think the concern (for anyone) is that with enough post history, just about anyone would be able to identify you AND would have knowledge of just about every aspect of your life.
This goes beyond what Amazon or Google might do, since they’re just concerned about monetizing.
Nobody can anticipate all risks, especially if it comes out of the blue from an ex-employer, ex-partner, political opponent, neighbor, friend or ex-friend, etc.
Since many of us are new to Lemmy, and have an opportunity to blunt this kind of profile building right from the start, I was hoping that there may be some strategies we could use right away.
Then stick to “don’t be online” as you no matter what you do, you can’t anticipate how that will expose you later.
Right. You can’t anticipate how historical posts can affect you later, but are there strategies to limit this exposure?
I haven’t done this (yet), but I know some people will create numerous profiles and limit certain topics/subreddits/lemmy communities to specific profiles. That way, if profile A never discusses work or family, but only gardening, there’s almost no chance that someone targeting that profile could do much harm.
I guess, this would be the same as having multiple email addresses or alias/forwarding email addresses… to limit what information someone could possibly get from you, even if they had access to all email related to that single account.
I’d say no. Your fooling yourself if you think you can. The best you can do is make it harder, but that is only true compared to computing power. Problems that were hard, are now possible because computing power has increased.
Any one profile could give enough to out you. A textual analysis can tie separate text posted by different accounts to the same person. (Varying degrees of accuracy for this. If anyone would do parse all Lemmy comments to do this is separate issue.)
In short, don’t post anything that might compromise you. But how fruitful are conversations if you’re always hiding anything that might out you? Stick to only non personal stuff? Information about local shops, movies, etc etc can all narrow down your location. But even with that, narrowing down to a town with 50 people in it, is different to a town with 1 million people.
It isn’t only what you post. Someone else can also out you. Someone who knows you, or someone that you don’t know. Your PC can be hacked, etc etc. The options go on and on.
Define what your risk is. Define who your adversaries are. Then plan how to operate with acceptable risk tolerance.