In this day and age where governments globally (with the aid of some of the largest corporations) are trying to increase their ability to surveil and restrict what their citizens can do online without us handing over a lot of our personal privacy, the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) “Managing Your Digital Footprint” article posts some useful information and tips regarding the digital breadcrumbs one leaves behind (and steps to take to minimize the amount of trails one may not realize they are leaving).
Myself, I began doing this early on (since the late 90’s) and more so through the past decade and a half when it became clearer that technology was being used to erode privacy (this has accelerated in recent times as AI/ML is used for far more nefarious purposes rather than positive). And it is no longer mainly the bad actors; our governments (with their elite political class) are creating laws to accomplish this George Orwell style of dystopian surveillance for their citizens. In the not so distant past, this could have been easily filed into the tin-foil hat conspiracy theory file. But we are seeing this in action with things like online safety laws that are causing more platforms to institute some form of age verification (requiring your government ID or visual proof). For myself, any non-critical site that begins requiring that will be DOA (I will delete my accounts off of those sites).
While in the past, I did have a few accounts in my actual name, they also never contained other personally identifiable information beyond that. And I would also have a lot of information on them that were inconsistent enough to result in brokered data that was wrong. After a certain point though, I eliminated those accounts, created alternative names (with copy/pasted information, and changed some of that around just to feed more bad data into the whole thing). Most of my online activities in recent years have been with nicknames that have morphed over time (terms, foods, to variations on historical figures).
Observation: Even after over a decade of blogging on Blogger (Google owned) where I expected their activity tracking across different accounts would pickup at least some cross tracked data, the steps I took at minimum did help to prevent a lot of that tracking and profiling (the demographic data for each account was whatever their system guessed). However, given these broader efforts by actual governments to surveil their citizens much more carefully, one of the better recommendations now is to curtail ones presence/usage on these larger platforms (which helps to reduce the size/trails of these digital footsteps).
