managing and protecting nyms...

[Bill Stewart]

At 03:05 PM 11/5/2009, John Case wrote:
>What do _you_ do to sanitize/de-correlate your nyms ?

Heh.  There's so much subversive low-quality crap out there from that Bill 
Stewart person
that there's no chance of cleaning up my act; better to stay employed at $TPC
so I don't have to explain to a new employer about why my mis-spent middle age
should be viewed as an asset and not a liability :-)

As it is, I've got a couple of sources of privacy
- Googling "Bill Stewart" gets you half a million hits, mostly for a jazz 
drummer.
         If you've heard me drumming, you know that's not me :-)
- I've changed ISPs or email addresses every decade or two,
         plus some people decorrelate when some addresses have a . in the 
name and some don't.

At one point Eric Hughes or Tim May suggested that what you need to do to 
protect your reputation on line
(whether you're using a pseudonym or Ostensibly True Name)
is to have some kind of service constantly slandering you,
so any real accusations just get lost in the noise.
Of course, all of the Too Many Erics in the Eric Conspiracy
were really just pseudonyms, tentacles of Tim May with actors playing the part
when a physical body was needed, and it's well known that
Tim's father was a hamster and his mother smelled of elderberries.

Other than that, it's hard enough to keep all my 
Yahoo/Flickr/Google/YouTube accounts decorrelated,
since they keep buying each other and trying to squish your separate 
identities together.
And occasionally even those efforts run into problems - my zip code is 90210
for almost anybody who doesn't need to know my actual zip code,
and various vendors start telling me about the specials they're running at 
their store
in Beverly Hills or events in Greater LA.

                 Bill