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?
Don’t ever show your face, don’t give out job or home address or where you work, don’t post photos where you reflect back, don’t fall for thirst traps and give out your photo to supposed hot N sexy babes, also vpn and tell ppl you live in Texas when you really live in Vermont to fuck with doxxers
Use privacy respecting FOSS software.
That means, Linux, Modified android OSs, using browsers like Tor Librewolf.
Always use a VPN, and only use anonymous accounts.
That means no Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or any of the other data vultures.
There is no privacy online. Enough incentive your history across accounts, instances, usernames can be combined.
Think about risks instead. Who is going to use your post against you? How much effort are they going to go to? What’s your risk?
If you’re hiding from the a government, best not to be online. If what you post will get you killed, don’t post it.
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.
Lemmy isn’t a private messenger and it’s safe to assume that anything you post on a site like Lemmy or Reddit could be seen or saved by anyone. On reddit you can edit older posts into gibberish and then delete them, on Lemmy you cannot fully delete posts from all instances so you have to be very careful. Making a new account every once in a while may help depending on your threat model
Yes I don’t get how people have trouble understanding this. It’s like arguing that something you posted in 1982 is still on groups.google.com or marc.info.
On reddit you can edit older posts into gibberish and then delete them
Speaking of which, when I get my data export from Reddit, I do plan to edit my posts - is there a plugin or script that can do this automatically. I’m not going back to edit thousands of posts over the last 13+ years, which is something I did with Facebook and that took weeks! LOL
Google Power Delete Suite for Reddit
