Quote:
Originally Posted by PollyIvy
Tony, I understand why people feel that way, as I feel that way too. It is okay that my username came up on google. What makes me so uncomfortable is that anyone can click on the link and then read all my posts all together. So anyone who knows me would see everything i've written all at once and....
All that I would like to see is this: that someone would have to log in to be able to read all the posts in the profile.
It is just not quite private enough otherwise.
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I've posted this several times before, but I think it bears repeating in this context. Every few months someone posts an "oh my god, someone found out who I am on here; what happened to my privacy" type of post. (
example)
These forums are
not private, they are
anonymous. And they are only anonymous to the degree that you protect that anonymity, both in your postings on here, and in interactions with people in your real life.
We each technically compromise our privacy the moment we post anything on this forum - this is
inherently a public forum, and that fact is spelled out very clearly in the terms of service and help information. As pointed out above, go do a Google search on <Trimmer cheat wife> or <Trimmer wife divorce> or <Trimmer marry divorce> and in every case, you'll find links to my own Loveshack postings within the first few results returned by Google. My whole story is there for the reading, if you know where to look, and yes, you can get to all my posts starting with just my screen name.
The layers of insulation that I have provided myself are: (1) no-one would ever associate the screen name "Trimmer" with any real life version of me, (2) I've never told anyone that I post my relationship issues on here, or even generally on the internet, and (3) although I've posted a lot of information about my life, I've scrupulously avoided posting
enough detail about myself for anyone who knows me to definitively narrow it all down and put the whole picture together from an "outside in" keyword search. The closest I talk about where I live is to say "small town." I don't get specific about what my job is, etc... I don't think that anyone who knows me in real life - even my XW - could do even a pretty smart web search, and narrow me down to "Trimmer on Loveshack."
Now, on the other hand, even with all that caution, from an "inside out" perspective, I have no doubt that I could pick 8 or 10 of my postings, and if you put those in front of my XW, she could pretty much be sure - based on our common experiences - that they were written by me. Or if you told her to get on loveshack and look at "Trimmer's" postings, she would pretty quickly realize it was me. So really, my insulation is that (a) she doesn't know to look, (b) she probably doesn't
care to look, and (c) if she
did look - via web searching on keywords related to my life - most of the terminology I use to post is generic enough that a search would never narrow down usefully to Trimmer's postings on Loveshack.
So I think it's important to realize that posting on here is a risk management exercise. For example, theoretically, it's not impossible that before we separated, she might have seen "Loveshack.com" in the browser history on our computer, or through some other means where I had been incautious for a moment. If so, and she's interested in finding me, just that one piece of information would get her 90% of the way to finding my posts. I could imagine she might look for threads started around a particular time in our separation process, and she might stumble across one where I ask about telling kids about divorce; between the timing of the thread and other details posted there (ages, their reactions, etc), I think she would be certain it was me, and the door would be open.
In your case, using a screen name that may or may not be related to your real name, or a screen name that someone in your real life might associate with you (please, you don't use the same screen name on here and on myspace, do you?) could have the same effect.
Understand that it's a risk we take, based on the layers of insulation we may or may not provide ourselves, but realize that the possibility of discovery is still there.
So be careful in thinking that posting on Loveshack is
private - there's a big difference between that and maintaining
anonymity. And the reason I'm so vocal about it is that some of us here have a lot at stake, emotionally, socially, within our families, etc.
He's right, I did come up
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