How Your Username May Betray You

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday February 14, 2011 @06:12AM from the you-are-a-number-not-a-name dept.

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."

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Re:No problem by georgesdev · 2011-02-14 06:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

How about: they start creating a fake account with your user name on facebook, become friend with some of your linkedin contacts, post on your new friends walls a scam using distorted extracts of what you posted on slashdot. Ok, you did a decent job of hiding your true name with that GameboyRMH ID, but still, if you use the same ID on lots of sites, you're still vulnerable to the kind of scenario I mention above. Personally, any online account that is indexed by search engines, I use a fake ID, and move to another one every 2 years, and it's not the same as my email address, etc ...