You Can Find Me, If You Know Where To Look

I have been thinking a lot lately about my presence on the internet, and how much people can find out about me just by googling my full name. After a quick search, the list so far is running to:

• My job title, work phone number and work email address
• Various social networking profiles (livejournal, myspace, facebook) but with minimal information available to those not on my "friends" list
• Information on one of my bands, including recordings of our music
• Various online petitions I have signed
• My home address (whilst I've deleted that information, it's still being held in some caches)

This is what you can dig up if you know *just* my name. If you know the names of any of the projects or collectives I've been involved in, there is much, much more out there. It is this wealth of information that is out there that made me decide not to put my name, or my email address on this blog, and to choose a title that can't be linked back to any of my previous projects. You won't find this blog by googling my name.

But it's not a secret blog.

I imagine that at the moment the readership comprises entirely of people I know, who I have invited to come here as I thought they might enjoy my writing. But I'm not adverse to people who don't know me, or more importantly who I don't know, reading it. I just don't want a direct line between this and everything that came up before. There may be a trail of dots allowing the astute reader to guess their way from a to b, but I'm not going to join them up myself.

Part of the reason I have left such a trail online until now is that I liked the idea of people being able to recognise me from one online community to the next. Consistently using a username and email address that was closely linked to my name meant that people I knew both on and offline could keep in touch with me. Having a consistent online identity made it easier in the zine world, especially as I published my own zines and distributed the zines of others (which is how my address came to be online.)

So I'm not denying that it's worked in my favour, this internet presence. In fact, my last girfriend got to know me after buying a zine from my distro at a gig, then googling me, then finding I was in a band, then turning up at my next gig and talking to me. (She also joked that she looked my address up on googlemaps before getting to know me, which is less funny when we get to the next paragraph). And whilst I was glad she did that, it made me realise how much information was out there about me. She could access all my online profiles and through them find out all my favourite books, read conversations I had with friends, see photos of me spanning back years. So I tightened up my online security, or at least I thought I had.

But recently, someone I didn't even know started amassing information on me via the internet. From what I have worked out, she found my address via the distro I used to run (and proceeded to lurk outside the house, or so I have been told), and used the email address for that distro to search for blogs I had written, and found one that me and a friend wrote together. She then used to the information she learned about me there to try and persuade my boyfriend that he would be better off ending our relationship and starting one with her. Unsurprisingly, he was not convinced.

But it un-nerved me. Not because I saw her as a threat to my relationship, but because of how relatively easy it must have been for her to find all those things out. I had always thought that my open-ness about my online identity was a good thing. I've never been afraid to put my name to any of my views,  political or personal, and I've used the internet as a pretty successful way to connect to other like-minded people, some who I didn't know, some who I knew peripherally from my social scene but wanted to get to know better and that old favourite of people I had lost touch with. I'd naively just never seriously thought about the flipside, that someone could take all that readily available information and try and use it against me.

So that's why I approached this blog from a slightly different angle. It's still about me and my life; it's a perblog after all. It just can't be found by googling my name.