1
Showerthought: My first chat room flame war in 1997 taught me to never use my real name online
I was in a Yahoo chat room for fans of the band Garbage, arguing about their second album, when someone pulled my full name from my AOL profile and posted my parents' listed phone number. It was a quiet Tuesday night in my bedroom in Toledo, and it felt like the whole world just crashed in. Anyone else have a moment from those early days that made you lock down your privacy settings for good?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
wesley8731mo ago
I read an article about a guy who got swatted in 2004 because his home address was in a public WHOIS lookup for his personal website domain. That stuff was just out there for anyone to find. It made me realize how much we just gave away without a second thought back then. Your Garbage chat room story is the same kind of wake up call. We were all just typing into the void without any idea who was really on the other end. The internet felt like a private club but it was actually a public square with your name on a billboard.
4
robert2751mo ago
That WHOIS thing was a real problem, I get that. But I don't know if it was all just giving stuff away. For a lot of us, putting your real name on a GeoCities page was the point. It was like your little corner of the web, and you owned it. The billboard feeling came later when everything got scraped and sold. Back then, it felt more like putting a flyer on a coffee shop board than shouting in a square.
0