If you want to be safe online and express yourself freely, using whatever name happens to be on your government-issued ID cards isn’t conducive to either of these goals. I and others of my generation knew this. We likewise knew not to give out other personal details, especially our photos, phone numbers, or mailing addresses.
And yet we forgot this wisdom instead of passing it down to those following in our footsteps. Why? For a shot at prominence, for convenience, for commerce, or because we thought the internet was, or should be, real life.
I personally would like to go back to being anonymous, and reinvent myself online in a way I can’t do in the real world, but it’s probably too late for me short of drastic measures. I’m reminded of sorcerers in Glen Cook’s annals of the Black Company. They would reinvent themselves, wrapping themselves in layers of dark enchantments, until they were enigmatic figures of dire power who could only be brought down if somebody discovered their true names and used it against them.
How did they go about concealing their names? Often by murdering everybody who knew them before they became sorcerers, sometimes wiping entire villages or even cities off the map. Even if that were a realistic option for me, let alone a palatable one, I doubt Catherine would approve.
My advice to you, if you’re a young person first venturing online, is to never reveal your name or other identifying details online. Not if you can avoid it. There’s no unringing that bell for me; even if I were to scrub all traces of my existence from the network and then retire to some remote place, if I ever published something online again under a pseudonym it might only be a matter of time before somebody recognized me by a phrase or metaphor I habitually use.
Or, perhaps, a tendency to quote Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime in online political arguments when it seems appropriate.
In any case, I am used to my name and face being online. And because I am a householder and property ownership is a matter of public record, if somebody wanted to find out where I live they could probably do so relatively easily. That’s been the case for years. It was a risk I understood and accepted when I first published a novel a decade ago, and I generally don’t regret it.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t advise it. If I had been sensible, I might have published under a pseudonym as Trevanian did. Perhaps if I had consistently used “Starbreaker” as a pseudonym, I could have released novels as if they were heavy metal albums and cultivated an air of mystery, letting people wonder if Starbreaker was a single author or a collective.
However, I had not thought to do that in 2013, instead registering my name as a .com domain. I still hold that domain, but prefer now to use this one for my personal website.
Thus I again urge you, if you are new to the internet, to avoid the use of social media or other platforms that do not permit you to remain anonymous or adopt a pseudonym. Nevertheless, depending on how careless your elders were, it might already be too late for you.
At least my mother didn’t have the ability to post my baby pictures to Facebook when I was still a child. Yours may well have done, and if that is indeed the case you have my sympathies.