The bottom line is that this is a public web site, and as such it's visible to... the public! That can be by browsing the site itself, or by search results from the various crawlers. Bluntly, as has been so pithily stated by others, "You have no privacy [on the internet]. Get over it" (see
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article1850998.ece, referenced by
http://whatupmedia.blogspot.com/2010/10/internet-you-have-no-privacy-get-over.html.
Obviously, I don't want my posts on this board to be associated with me in Real Life [tm] or my other social / professional profiles - so, how can I prevent that? My personal approach, which may or may not turn out to be adequate, is as follows:
- Use a unique user name, email address and password for this board
- Disclose minimum personal information that could be used to correlate this ID with others (eg birthdate, physical location, occupation)
It would be trivial for the sysadmins to use my logged IP addresses to correlate to other results, but I choose to trust them. Equally, I could choose not to disclose anything here that I wouldn't want my employer, colleagues, clients etc. to know, but to me that defeats the purpose of the board. At the end of the day, there's a balancing act between disclosure, discovery and dishonesty that I'm trying to carry out to further my best interests.