[Stampo00]

I am also very careful about using my name online. I've worked very hard to minimize my so-called digital footprint. My full name is unique enough that there's only one other person in the world who shares it with me. I get his email all the time.

I have friends with very common names. They share their names with hundreds of people, living and dead.

That gave me an idea. If you can't reduce the signal, you can at least increase the noise. If you spam the web with conflicting information tied to your name, and do it in a smart enough way that your noise can't be easily correlated, it should be just as effective. For example, if all of the noise is produced over the course of a single weekend, that's easy to filter out. So you'd need to create a slow, deliberate disinformation campaign around your name.

At one point, I even considered paying for fake obituaries in small local papers around the country. Maybe just one every year or so. Those things last forever on the web.

Good luck! If you choose to go this route, I wish you could share your strategies, but revealing too much might compromise your efforts.