I can be identified. And until very recently, if you searched under my legal name, you found little or nothing about me online, never mind that if you knew where to look, there was ridiculous amounts of information about me online under various forum handles and blogs.
If you have really serious fame of the sort that means millions know your name, you may find it hard to obfuscate your activities. If you are doing something so bad that some government wants your hide, yeah, they may find you.
But for most folks who just, say, don't want their "respectable clients" to know their porn habits or something like that, having a nickname that your friends know you under separate from your "public"/professional identity can have loads of value and can be sustained for a lot of years without much effort at all.
If that were true, a great many more people would be locked up, or disappeared, across the world. Pseudonyms have been essential long before the internet, long before electricity. They should not be looked down upon.
Nor should they be a privilege. It is cute when a celeb adopts a "stage name". We don't really consider that hiding, but politicians use stage names too. When you want to actually research a person, say to find out if they have a criminal background, cute "stage names" become barriers to legitimate research. If the wealthy and powerful get to use pseudonyms, everyone gets to use pseudonyms.
Any devoted individual with sufficient will and power can track you down. Even with a little less power, will can do it. We rely on the fatigue of adversaries and limits on their time and resources. Any sufficiently motivated entity can find out who you are.
Any sufficiently motivated entity can easily bypass any kind of lock on my front door, no matter how much money/effort I put into securing it. Doesn't mean I should leave my door unlocked though.
Of course not. I don't think it need be stated on HN but just in case, security is all about probability, and part of that guess is how motivated your adversary is. If you do a good job of making it too much of a hassle to target you, you can get away with not worrying about being successfully attacked.
If you are a high value target, then you need to step up your game, but people always make mistakes and don't appreciate unusual attack vectors.
>> Any sufficiently motivated entity can find out who you are.
Then the CIA and FDB have jobs for you. There are a great many people who very effectively hide their online activities from even the best and most determined adversaries. Encryption, obfuscation, old fashioned trade craft, it isn't all that difficult to hide online. Anyone who deems the fight unwinnable has accepted an end to privacy.
I don't think it's unwinnable, but why would you put out the impression that it's not actually very hard to thwart any adversary? Note that the people who can truly get away with it are a very small bunch or they aren't valuable enough to target.
See Dread Pirate Roberts for a good example. People eventually get caught if they make enough mistakes and are sufficiently valuable to powerful adversaries.
May be we actually agree about how hard it is, but are saying different words, like when you say "a great many" and I say "very small bunch" (like a "great many" in light of the power of actors like governments and ubiquity of surveillance). But such a perspective of complacency expressed here could only lead poor folk to being too lax, and thus, eventually finding their security compromised.
The most impressive pseudonymous technology person I can think of to date is IceFrog, the brains behind the longest iteration of DotA 1 who Valve somehow unearthed to lead DOTA2 design.
People have tried to discover who he really is for over a decade, and only have a guess for his real name and age. Given that people have known of him since 2006 (for a twitter account with ~100k followers and known lead for a game with a million MAU), in this era, that's super impressive.
If you have really serious fame of the sort that means millions know your name, you may find it hard to obfuscate your activities. If you are doing something so bad that some government wants your hide, yeah, they may find you.
But for most folks who just, say, don't want their "respectable clients" to know their porn habits or something like that, having a nickname that your friends know you under separate from your "public"/professional identity can have loads of value and can be sustained for a lot of years without much effort at all.