A stalking challenge

My identity on the net is...quite strange. How to bring it out? I have seen a bunch of people who mistaken me as a girl, due to how I chat and my display names. I also almost never put my photos on the net, except for Facebook in which my mum does all the uploads for me. Hence, without some effort, it is quite hard for someone to find out who I am in real life, at least that's what I thought.

Discord is the social site I spend the most time on, so naturally it contains the most amount of my stuff. For a long time, I have told the guys in the Tower of Saviors Discord that I have accidentally left something that allows them to search for my Facebook account. I'm serious about that - but it is a little hard to get such stuff from such an implicit hint so I didn't bother to delete it, neither do they bother to dig it out.

But, today we talked about photos - and the topic flew out again.

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Source

So two players wanted to actually dig it out - I welcomed them to do so with a condition of holding common sense (well, even if they don't I can just delete the message and probably kick if they go too far - I am a moderator). I narrowed the hint at some channel topic, then let them have the fun.

As I am thinking if that is the only thing I left, apparently not.

My Discord account was connected to my Steam account, and my Steam account indeed has my real name in it. Well, I found it after the challenge started, so I just kept it there for a moment, and announced that there's another explicit hint somewhere not in the chat log. Then, they continued. To be honest, the hint is a little too implicit for them to find out - it is some screenshot of a game, and it contains my username, and searching for the username on the game's site will bring up my old username, which is equivalent to my real name. I know, it is hilarious to use real name as username, but you cannot blame me for doing that when I was like 12 or 13...

So, about a few moments later...someone did succeed in finding my Facebook account out.

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At first, I thought that he used my Steam account's information, because it was explicit as heck. But no. He used a different approach - Google search.

By searching my Discord username, he found my Twitter account, which has it as the display name but real name as username (yes, same reason as above). Then, he further confirmed it by checking the replies history - I had conversations with ppy, the head developer of osu!, and the game's designer, Flyte, too. That can confirm that the account holder is an osu! player in which I am.

Then, he managed to scope out my GitHub account using a similar way. Although I don't have any emails or contact information related to my real name or private stuff on it, he can further confirm that I am the holder of that Twitter account, and hence can further confirm that that was my real name.

Everyone in that Discord server knows that I am in Malaysia, so that makes things easy. He just typed my name into Facebook's search box, then...tadaa~

Source

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It was pretty mind blowing that it is really easy to stalk someone on the net, and hence I went and cleared whatever traces he told me. My Twitter account is now deactivated (because I never use it to be honest), Steam account cleaned, and I think I can't recall anything else that can be cleaned or requires cleaning. It is indeed true that the longer you stay on the net, the more data about you is available on it, and the easier others can find you out.

Oh well, it's not like you can keep a secret forever, and I have nothing to hide :)

Stay safe on the net!

--Lilacse