I have a certain degree of regret that a business proposition I’d accepted a bit over a year ago required the use of, at minimum, my real first name; I’d've rather have kept that online persona separate from life-segments such as job and job search. On the other hand, life morphs into such a manner that it is hard to segment one’s life completely, using one identity for one activity sector (e.g., work) and another for a different activity sector (e.g., political activism); in the end, one person from one segment needing to know information that is generally available only to the other segment cracks the separating wall and merges the two (or more) sub-identities. (This is one reason nobody has seen “T`Mana” in public for over 20 years.)

There are certain things I do not post in mainstream social media: the names of family members (not even first names), personal contact information beyond an e-mail address (and sometimes not even that!), my physical address, and my mailing address for starters. Nevertheless, someone who is that interested in finding out more about me could discover that information fairly easily.

The other aspect of online privacy is that if you don’t expect any, you won’t be disappointed when it’s stripped away by bots, spiders, search engines, and increasingly intrusive laws. (It’s perhaps easier for those of us who started off in ham radio: everything is “in the clear”, so we usually don’t disclose our last names, phone numbers, or physical addresses.)