I'm usually pretty open about raging on thread necromancers but since I didn't post in this thread two years ago I guess it's fine
Well, I've been connected [to the net] in some form or another for a ridiculously long time now and have seen it evolve a fair bit since the early 90s. The car club which I'm a part of has active forums, and on the flipside the comp-related forum i'm part of has developed enough local interest to hold live meets. The IP crunch caused by people networking everything from cell phones to fucking espresso machines has made it very clear that we are connected to the internet by so many threads that building a profile of a real person is very possible and
very easy.
Going off on an S&T tangent (this is for people who use open WiFi hotspots a lot), anyone with a small suite of networking tools, laptop and five minutes can easily jack your session and see what it is you're doing online just by seeing you use your smartphone at a coffeeshop and giving in to curiosity.
It's pretty scary to see shit that's happening in the Middle East, where people are being persecuted for information they share over the net, and even at home in America where incomprehensible gibberish known as copyright lawsuits are brought against private individuals because someone is seeing at least part of what they are doing online. Twitter actually just released a "transparency report" detailing how often the government requests user account information and the U.S. leads the pack by a wide margin. Obviously, if the government finds it a priority to know what ordinary people are doing online, there may be a damn good reason to disassociate your virtual identity from your real one.
So yeah, I'm not very open. Or at least, sure I'm open in the sense that I speak my mind but closed off in the sense that I have a number of different email addresses, internet connections and associated identities for the different things I do online.
This reminds me of a Seinfeld episode where George explains his two personalities:
GEORGE:I have Relationship George, but there is also Independent George. That’s the
George you know, the George you grew up with — Movie George, Coffeeshop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.
JERRY: I love that George.
GEORGE: Me too! And he’s dying, Jerry! If Relationship George walks through this
door, he will kill Independent George!
Long story short, if you are doing things online that you wouldn't want your employer finding out about, don't be too open
