[nihilocrat]

Everyone should learn at an early age that they need at least two addresses; one for personal asshattery ([e-mail]) and one for professional or semiprofessional correspondence ([e-mail]). Only use the professional one for your professional correspondence (sending resumes) or signing up for mailing lists / whatever where you are going to be on your best behavior (an open source project's mailing list). Use leethaxor for whatever the hell you want.

On a similar note, use 'leethaxor' when posting your personal opinion in a comment / on a forum... if you make a comment / post in your real name, assume it will show up on the first page when someone googles your name (this actually happens a lot).

Preventing the need for your personal data to be removed is the best way of ensuring your privacy, rather than wishing you had never written that Harry Potter slash fanfic eight years ago under your real name.

[khafra]

Yup, I figured this out around 1995, when getting my first hotmail account. Keeping your normal online persona psuedonymous means never having to say "I'm sorry." Of course, it's still sorta easy to leak personally identifying information, but at least it'll take some more sophisticated data mining to connect those dots; something like what this one hosted java connection-finder whose name I can't remember does.

[danielh]

The downside of this approach is that you have to mess up only once and accidentally create a connection between 'leethaxor' and 'your.name'.

And because you felt safe when posting as leethaxor, the result will be much worse than if you just posted sane stuff under your real name.