> The expectation is that you don’t have to fear anything for lawful activity. For the most part, that’s not too far from reality
This worldview is so far outside of mine that I'm not sure how to address it or respond to it. It's just a completely foreign idea to me. Is doxing not a thing in Germany?
In America, even if I'm not doing something controversial, even if I'm just streaming video games on Twitch, I might still choose not to share my real name, or I might choose to set up a virtual avatar, it's turned out to be way too easy to find other information using just a real name.
I've basically never done even a single thing in my life worth paying attention to on a large scale, I don't have an online following, I'm not particularly active or famous in any communities, and I'm a privileged/uncontroversial person. Even so, I've still had people that I've never met contact me unprompted and try to figure out my real address before (fortunately all nice people who weren't stalkers). Any subject or project at all where I'm even remotely scared of that happening (or even where I just don't want it to happen because it would be inconvenient), I don't release under my real name. I assume that if I ever was the target of harassment online, if they know my real name there's enough information about me that's slipped outside of my control that they would be able to find me. I don't need to do anything illegal for that to happen, we've seen targeted harassment over ridiculous things like girls playing video games.
And the harassment concerns are separate from the branding issues where I try to keep my identity online relatively consistent when possible. If I'm building an experimental project or something that's outside of my normal persona that I normally project online, then just for pure branding purposes I often try to release it under a different identity. That too is a concern I feel is more important than many people realize, if you ever become a subject of attention online, my understanding is that people expect a kind of unreasonable consistency in all of your activity beyond what they expect in real life.
I don't know how Germany wouldn't suffer from those same problems, but if it doesn't, I guess that seems like a nice place to live? I release a fair amount of stuff under my real name, and I generally advocate that other people do the opposite. If you're building an online identity today my feeling is you should completely unlink it from your physical identity, if I could go back in time to my early computing years I wouldn't use the handle `danshumway` online.
When I host projects or enter conversations online I am to some extent inviting people into my personal life. If I'm using a consistent identity across time or across multiple sites, I'm also to some degree inviting people to correlate those posts/sites together. That's an intentional action I'm taking, but being able to set boundaries around that invitation is important to me. I use anonymity/privacy to set those boundaries.
This worldview is so far outside of mine that I'm not sure how to address it or respond to it. It's just a completely foreign idea to me. Is doxing not a thing in Germany?
In America, even if I'm not doing something controversial, even if I'm just streaming video games on Twitch, I might still choose not to share my real name, or I might choose to set up a virtual avatar, it's turned out to be way too easy to find other information using just a real name.
I've basically never done even a single thing in my life worth paying attention to on a large scale, I don't have an online following, I'm not particularly active or famous in any communities, and I'm a privileged/uncontroversial person. Even so, I've still had people that I've never met contact me unprompted and try to figure out my real address before (fortunately all nice people who weren't stalkers). Any subject or project at all where I'm even remotely scared of that happening (or even where I just don't want it to happen because it would be inconvenient), I don't release under my real name. I assume that if I ever was the target of harassment online, if they know my real name there's enough information about me that's slipped outside of my control that they would be able to find me. I don't need to do anything illegal for that to happen, we've seen targeted harassment over ridiculous things like girls playing video games.
And the harassment concerns are separate from the branding issues where I try to keep my identity online relatively consistent when possible. If I'm building an experimental project or something that's outside of my normal persona that I normally project online, then just for pure branding purposes I often try to release it under a different identity. That too is a concern I feel is more important than many people realize, if you ever become a subject of attention online, my understanding is that people expect a kind of unreasonable consistency in all of your activity beyond what they expect in real life.
I don't know how Germany wouldn't suffer from those same problems, but if it doesn't, I guess that seems like a nice place to live? I release a fair amount of stuff under my real name, and I generally advocate that other people do the opposite. If you're building an online identity today my feeling is you should completely unlink it from your physical identity, if I could go back in time to my early computing years I wouldn't use the handle `danshumway` online.
When I host projects or enter conversations online I am to some extent inviting people into my personal life. If I'm using a consistent identity across time or across multiple sites, I'm also to some degree inviting people to correlate those posts/sites together. That's an intentional action I'm taking, but being able to set boundaries around that invitation is important to me. I use anonymity/privacy to set those boundaries.