How Your Username May Betray You

An anonymous reader writes "By creating a distinctive username—and reusing it on multiple websites—you may be giving online marketers and scammers a simple way to track you. Four researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) studied over 10 million usernames—collected from public Google profiles, eBay accounts, and several other sources. They found that about half of the usernames used on one site could be linked to another online profile, potentially allowing marketers and scammers to build a more complex picture the users."

Comments

Oh, and then there are the cookies

[Palestrina]

And the installed fonts, and the screen resolution and color depth and the dozens of other factors that combined allow you to be tracked.

Try this web site for an idea of how these factors can (in combination) uniquely identify you:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

I see that my browser is unique among the 1.4 million tested, with 20 bits of identifying information. Knowing my user name isn't going to compromise my privacy all that much more, especially compared to how Facebook screws your privacy every day.