I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her.
She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her name was a Project Veritas video where they had cornered her to ask some questions about her workplace and skewer her for whatever soundbites they could get. It was heartbreaking.
It’s an example of the benefits of the “security through obscurity” security posture. If there’s lots of info about you online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative information.
The “stay offline / stay ungoogleable” security posture, on the other hand, is fragile with respect to random spikes of negative information.
Reality is that there’s a gray area and most people have middling risk tolerance in this area. As for me, I rarely post on social media and have never deliberately cultivated an online presence, so I’m somewhat ungoogleable. But not so much that someone couldn’t find me if they really tried. An seo-heavy event like that Project Veritas thing would probably take over my SEO presence, but I’m okay with that risk, and I also have the skills to spin up an official personal site if I want to.
For a while, I actively tried to remove my google results, but there are still archive and social media sites that have my info up, despite my best attempts to take it down. There are also people’s personal sites that have my info, but I don’t want to contact them, because I doubt that these people would believe that this is a case of mistaken identity, and I don’t want to draw attention to myself all over again. I have family who had a similar thing happen, and they counseled me not to take legal action, since it would probably lead my harassers to double down.
So now I am trying to rebuild my actual, positive online presence, except for contact information, because I still fear for my physical safety all these years later. It is a delicate balance. The political situation here (US) is so unstable, the memory of the internet is so long, and developing technology (generative AI) is making it so that there might be a point in the future where a sufficiently motivated individual could exact political retribution on a whole set of perceived enemies at once. This would make my entire life a hellish experience (or end it), no matter the fact that I wasn’t an extremist. I feel that this makes my online presence as essential to my well-being as things like exercise, investing for retirement, etc.
There is a lot of information that's public as a matter of law--which arguably, in many cases, hasn't reconciled that a lot of public information is no longer just stored in a file cabinet in some dusty county or town clerk's office.
>sense that I got was that name changes for men are logistically challenging.
To the degree that's true I assume that women changing their names when they get married (or divorced) has been such a norm for centuries that it doesn't invite scrutiny (although I've heard plenty of complaints about what a headache it can be in terms of various IT systems etc.) I assume when men do it, there might be at least a suspicion that something shady is going on.