Note that the corporate world isn’t much better. I work for a fortune 100 firm and employee email addresses are FirstName.MiddleInitial.LastName@company.com Yep, the full name, complete with middle initial if you use one, just like credit cards! I’ve never worried too much about anonymity on the net, but still…
You don’t want to think about the directory services available on the corporate intranet. In theory they’re “private” because they’re only accessible to “employees”. It would be almost trivial for one employee to track another to their home address and home contact info.
Still, this varies wildly. Some companies are even worse(I’ve seen FirstName.MI.LastName@company.region.country) and I’m quite frankly scared about the types of naming conventions the public sector(especially local governments, city, municipal, etc, who often don’t have the resources to think through the possible consequences of directory services or the experts available to inform them of the risks) might be using. Anyone have any experience in that front? Military addresses, local government, state, even federal?
I also have a federal government email address because of my clinical rotation. The first part is worst than my school address. LastName.FirstName,MI. The domain is City.Division.FederalAgency.gov. Other than calling the main number and asking to be transferred to me (Good Effing Luck!!! Bwahahaha ). I don’t see anyone locating me from it.
This is not necessarily restricted to .edu addresses. I used to use a local ISP that proudly gave the city and state on its website. A potential stalker had this information, then tried to narrow my personal information down from there. Once I got wind of this, I got a yahoo.com e-mail in short order.
Yes, I know that my current yahoo.com e-mail is my full, legal name. Yes, I know that I’ve posted some details about where I live. However, given that my phone is unlisted, and the only people I deal with take my privacy even more seriously than I do, good luck finding me!
I always set up a dummy account at subdimension or yahoo or somewhere for online contacts who I haven’t brought into the “inner circle” yet. My college email is gtg346g but no way to relate that to my name, but indeed the college directory or even searching for that on the web would bring information to catch up with me.
It freaks me out that my post is no longer here. What was so ** wrong with it?
I like Reality Chuck’s, Daniel’s and Lsura’s school’s method of generating e addresses. But MSU students chose their own. I wonder if it’s because it was back when, it seemed like we just got email/Netscape. We had black screens with yellow or green letters, and commands were Ctrl-S, Ctrl-O, Ctrl-X. I got email solely because in those days, I did not know what continent my brother would be on at any given time. The first time I got a msg from him was really weird. I felt like he had sneaked (snuck) in to the campus at night, left a post-it note, and gone all the way back home.
R. Chuck: Can a person just try all the server names until s/he gets the right one? How many servers does the school have?
Now I’m really confused. I knew it was strange that my post was gone. I guess it’s a bad computer day where only one page is showing. (When I opened the thread it went down to EatsCrayons and cut off right before mine!) :o Lasts just long enough to make me look bad.
Did you ever try Googling yourself? Often a ton of stuff comes up that way to. Also most colleges allow you to opt out of disclosing that personal information in directories- I always did.
Finally, for friend may want to think about getting up a Yahoo account, rather then using her school email for that sort of thing.
At Rutgers, they made it so you had to pick a eight-letter userid for e-mail. Worked out well, except that a lot of stuff was gone already by the time you got to choose… and some people got stuck graduating and submitting resumes with such wonderful freshman ideas as “weedhead@” or “startrek@”.
Now I’m really confused. I knew it was strange that my post was gone. I guess it’s a bad computer day where only one page is showing. (When I opened the thread it went down to EatsCrayons and cut off right before mine!) :o Lasts just long enough to make me look bad.