Month: May 2014

I’ve written before how I wanted to start killing my unified online identity.
And, just over a year since I posted that, it has begun.
The death knell has been struck for the previous lynch-pin – my Twitter. It was the easiest account of mine to find online (a work colleague found it with a 30 second Google search). It made easy to follow links to numerous other online identities of mine, as I cross posted. It was public.
Well, no more.
Yesterday I took the drastic step of just leaving that account. I’ve made a new Twitter. A protected Twitter, so that my tweets cannot be seen by all and sundry. I’ve added some of those that came first to mind as people who I trust with my new account. Hopefully this will enable me to censor myself less on there. There have been things I’ve wanted to retweet, things I’ve wanted to @ reply to, that I haven’t been able to because my tweets were public. And that was getting uncomfortable for me.
 
I’ll keep the old account lying around, I’ll use it mostly to tweet links to IRL things, e.g. if I get a new job or promotion; or tweet links to these posts. But my real Twitter is now only for my close friends. Those who have been let past my second level of barriers. It’s a shame. There are those I really do enjoy interacting with on Twitter – people from work, and those I am friends with, but I need to draw the line somewhere on the new account otherwise I will end up back in the same situation as before.
So, with my Twitter now mostly inactive, I’ve taken one of the biggest steps towards splitting up my online identities. Obviously, my ISP and such like will still be able to correlate (I’m not yet using Tor for all accounts – it seems particularly pointless using it for accounts where people know who I am in real life), and there will always be the possibility of my social graphs causing a link. But that kind of seepage is a lot harder for a generally interested person to find, than scrolling down my twitter history to find where I’ve linked to my other accounts.
In addition, as my Twitter was the source for most of my FB posts, that is also going to be going rather quiet. I mostly use FB for messages now anyway, so I guess not much has changed in that regard.
Now I just need to swap out my other accounts for new ones as well. That’s a lot easier when they don’t enforce real name policies. But that can wait until this new Twitter has settled down.
Speaking of which, it’s likely that there are people reading this who aren’t yet following my new Twitter, but could be. Contact me via private means if you’re interested (Twitter DM on my original account, FB message, Email etc). I do reserve the right to not share it though – as I said, I don’t want to start censoring myself on there like I have been before.