as much as I agree in theory that it’s better not to make yourself easy to doxx on the Internet

any time I try to think about how to actually accomplish this, I end up concluding that literally anything I could want to talk about, no matter how I say it, could be used by any dedicated enemy wanting to find out everything about my real life

Even assuming they don’t have any access to the data that’s automatically collected about me (which they could if they’re a corporation, or someone with enough influence to get a subpoena)

they can still use anything. backgrounds of any photos I take, mentions of any shopping or activities I do near home, mentions of things I don’t even realize are region-specific. Even the very timing of my posts, along with the vaguest mention of my sleeping/eating/working hours, will narrow down my location to the time zone. 

Then it’s just a few steps before they can scour every thing I talk about and find ways to narrow it down further,  up to the point of knowing my home and work address 

…corporations sending me junk mail obviously already do this, because they have access to automatically collected data. So can the government, if they object to anything I say online (which they definitely would, if they considered me important enough). 

If Disney (from their position of being both a huge corporation and practically a branch of the government) decided to stop tolerating fanfic, and judged that my riffs on their Tron property were not acceptable fair use and should be legally punished, they would be able to find me in minutes, no matter how careful I was

If another regular person, without corporate or government powers, tried hard enough, they could find me too. They’ve done it to people who hide their identity much more carefully. That’s what kiwifarms was for, and that shit still happens. 

tl;dr…. there’s two possibilities: you have enemies  who hate you enough to try and ruin your real life (in which case they can find you, regardless of how careful you are). Or you don’t have them (in which case no one cares about finding you, regardless of how careful you are.) 

The choice of how much info you share might affect how likely this is. but the biggest factor is almost certainly “how motivated is the other person.”

so whenever people are being careless with their personal info online… I tend to assume it’s probably for the same reason they might not bother to lock the door if the entire wall was missing.