= privacy vs the desire to connect

wow, it's my second post and i'm already talking about a topic this deep?
you bet.

how the privacy obsession started

tldr: i read too much /g/.

but in all seriousness, it's weird. i've been a somewhat chronically online fag since the moment i started recording memories in my brain. i quite literally live online. i've been a part of lots of communities, some of which were full of adolescent skids who acquired their daily dose of happiness by doxxing people. sometimes they did it to make fun of you, sometimes they wanted to blackmail you, and sometimes they did it for no reason.

sometimes, if you made friends with someone, they would backstab you a while later. your identity was now public, and you were getting death threats and dozens of pizzas and other mostly useless shit shipped to where you lived. obviously, they didn't pay for all that. the delivery person thought you were the one who ordered it. you were expected to pay. you were harassed. your stress levels were above the sky.

because i interacted with all kinds of people, lots of stuff had happened to me. i learned to stop leaking information about myself. i conditioned myself to protect my identity. the trust issues i gained over the years only made me more effective at it.

in high school, i was most active in these kinds of communities. i felt comfortable. it was fun. it felt like i was playing gang wars with other people. obviously, it was a bit more serious than that -- people were doxxing each other and doing some skid-level hacking -- but i still think it was more of a “kids doing dumb shit” thing than a “serious cybercriminals committing actual crimes” thing.

i didn't think this whole phase would have a lasting effect on my personality, but here we are :p

how it continued

some of my friends were already reading threads on /g/ and watching Mental Outlaw, Louis Rossmann, and bugswriter on youtube. people around me were doing stupid shit that got them arrested or questioned by the feds, and because i didn't feel like being interrogated myself, i had to go into schizo mode.

i learned how much information can truly be collected about you when you're online.

i learned how much of that information is often potentially misused.

i spent lots of time learning about different cryptography concepts and the tools that use them.

i spent lots of time messing with those tools in pursuit of “the ultimate opsec” (sounds very silly, i know).

every time i said something, i had to think about the ways that information could be used against me.

was it healthy? hell naw!

was it cool? i guess!

did i feel like the biggest schizo ever? yup!

what's it like today?

i still do all that shit even today, out of fear of a threat that doesn't actually exist.

the worst part of it is what the title is referring to. i'm afraid to share any information about myself because someone might misuse it in the future.

i spent hours writing all this because, before every word, i still think about whether i want to share it with the readers of my blog. (and it's also been a while since i've written anything coherent in English, but that's not the topic of this post!!)

• what if i leaked my approximate location and someone came and stabbed me to death? i have photos of myself uploaded to this website anyway, so it wouldn't be hard to recognize me.
• what if i shared exactly which communities i came from? that could expose most of my previous aliases and any information i disclosed in the past. link those together, and you'll know exactly what kind of person i am.

this thought process is arguably pretty schizo-like. it doesn't help me as a programmer, either. i've worked on countless super interesting, super cool projects, but i can't share any of them. that would create a link between all my aliases.

what would happen at a job interview? what if the interviewer wanted to know what i'd been working on?

oh, then let's just remake those projects, but differently! waste of time. also, wouldn't it be weird if multiple aliases had worked on super similar projects?

oh well, let's just tell the interviewer about all my different projects across my aliases! that's no good. the interviewer would know about all of them, and they could draw a line between them if they were curious.

and it's all soooo mentally draining.

if i could clone myself, it would be soo easy. every clone would have its own history, preferences, and name.

but i'm only one person, afraid to tell potential friends basic-ass information about myself.

• what if i leaked my approximate location and someone from the same area who liked me invited me out for a burger? we could make friends!
• what if i shared exactly which communities i came from? that could be a good conversation starter. maybe someone else has similar experiences, and we could talk about them for hours.

sounds better now, doesn't it? this is what you're potentially missing out on when you do the same thing as me.

i've had people ask for my socials a couple of times in the past.

i don't use facebook. i don't use instagram. i don't use tiktok. i don't use snapchat. i don't use twitter. i can't connect with people, and it's all by choice.

every platform collects all the information it can about you, down to the way you move your cursor.

the internet was made to bring together everyone and everything, wasn't it? why did you guys have to ruin it?

“on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog,” they say. until the discord ceo doesn't like you, grabs your ip address, email address, and billing information from the database, and personally walks to your apartment with a tencent-branded minigun to obliterate your buttcrack.

i find it scary that someone i don't know could gather all that information about me. it bothers me.

so what now?

i feel like it's impossible to completely stop this paranoia simulator.

i can't just stop caring about my privacy. i wouldn't want people to peep on me while i'm taking a shower, and i wouldn't want anyone to see a part of me that i wouldn't show them.

even though this whole thing is so heavy on my mental health, i still like dealing with it.

i like discovering new tools that help me stay private. i like discussing this topic with people and arguing about it with them.

it's an interesting topic.

i hope this post inspires someone else to share their experiences.

thank you for reading all that. i wish you a happy {insert appropriate part of the day here} :3