How Your Username May Betray You

An anonymous reader writes "By creating a distinctive username—and reusing it on multiple websites—you may be giving online marketers and scammers a simple way to track you. Four researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) studied over 10 million usernames—collected from public Google profiles, eBay accounts, and several other sources. They found that about half of the usernames used on one site could be linked to another online profile, potentially allowing marketers and scammers to build a more complex picture the users."

Pretty sure

[by (1706743)]

that my username won't betray me...

Do you really want to track

[Ranger]

someone down named Analintruder?

Strong Usernames should -

[genghisjahn]

Be at least 8 characters long. Have at least one upper and one lower case letter, a number, a symbol and an RGB code for your favorite color. Oh and change it every 6 months too.

Re:Pretty sure

[Abstrackt]

My username on every other site is hunter2, so it just comes up as asterisks anyway.

Re:Do you really want to track

[Abstrackt]

It shouldn't be that difficult. How many Analin Truders could there possibly be?

Re:Pretty sure

[Locke2005]

What a coincidence -- that's the combination on my luggage!

Re:Uh...

[Beardo the Bearded]

Yes.

Now, I have different usernames for a lot of different websites and IRL I don't have a beard. (I shaved it off in 2004.)

I was looking for a yoga mat; the "community" ones at the gym were a little more... used that I preferred for an item that I touch with my face. I am using IE7 since that's what corporate IT imposes. I was getting ads on /. for yoga classes and cheap yoga equipment. I volunteer at the YMCA and look up the schedule so I know what classes are on on a given day. I got ads for meeting "fitness singles".

I also, due to my work, look up a lot of military things. I was getting ads for martial arts training and "how to handle a handgun" and other things like that.

Apparently the ads computers think that yoga + military + YMCA = gay. I was getting ads for "meet local singles" with pictures of men. It was really weird until I realized that the ad servers think that I'm a fan of sausage. Or maybe they think I'm a woman; I look up vegan and vegetarian recipes and I'll look at knitting patterns to give my wife feedback. Oh, yeah, that makes more sense. They think I'm a woman.

(An ugly one...)

I've also got a quirk whereby the computers at work all go through the servers back east, so it also thinks that I live on the West Coast but work on the East coast; a 7000 mile trip can be covered in 30 minutes with ease.