[Aachen]

I use a random person's name because anonymous could be me but e.g. Josephine most definitely isn't a bloke.

A lesson learned with early feature phones and Bluetooth names in high school

At home my wifis are currently Japanese emojis, but anything funny goes

[TechBro8615]

Ideally you'd use the most common name, in order to maximize the size of your anonymity set. So you could go with "John Appleseed" to get a "john" home directory and a "John's MacBook Pro" hostname. But in a small community, to local observers seeing your device on bluetooth screens, you might get weird looks ("there is no John here, why is this sus?") whereas "iPhone" looks like a default. And for non-local observers, your choice of a name like "John" suggests you're a westerner named John. So by just going with "iPhone" or "MacBook" you're in a smaller anonymity set but also not drawing attention to yourself in your local area, and not externally leaking information like your locale (although of course you could always leave a false trail by using a cyrillic hostname).

Some other leaky, seemingly private identifiers are SSH pubkeys (I always delete the comment trailer), which are sent to every server you SSH to and also published to places like GitHub, and WiFi SSIDs (which are visible to any application with access to the network stack, and unfortunately aren't entirely within your control - often a list of nearby SSIDs, combined with a mapping of SSID to geolocation, is enough to triangulate your location to within a meter, which is one of many reasons I disable WiFi in favor of ethernet whenever possible).

[oxygen_crisis]

> seemingly private identifiers are SSH pubkeys (I always delete the comment trailer), which are sent to every server you SSH to and also published to places like GitHub

I use this in my .ssh/config file:

  Host *
    IdentitiesOnly = yes

... then you'll only send keys that are specified per-host in .ssh/config with 'IdentityFile' or with a command-line argument.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10004678

[ayewo]

I've always wondered if there was any downside to having my default private keyfile being shared whenever I fail to use the "-i" option to specify the correct keyfile when authenticating against a new server.

Thanks for linking to the previous HN discussion!