🥸️ How our social digital footprint screws us

This story, more practical than ever, is incredible in my opinion.
Not only does it demonstrate what lolis can get to with too much free time, like me; shows how everyone among us has a kind of “social fingerprint” that, if not adequately disguised, can identify us.

Important notes

Before starting, however, I need to clarify a few things.
Since the only thing I want is to share a story that I think is interesting and has some food for thought - and my hobby is not to ruin people’s lives - some details are omitted from the story, while others are invisibly altered, in order to to respect the privacy of the subject of the story. His old and new names will literally be replaced by “Deadname” and “Censored” respectively.
Everything, however, will become clear as you read.

A special memory

So, this story actually began at least 8 or 9 years ago.
I don’t remember exactly when, but let’s say that around that time I discovered Deadname. He created content on the Web and, other than the fact that I really liked it, there’s not much more to say.

Some time later, much to my chagrin, he announced that he would stop making new stuff. From one day to the next he said that the social spaces that were his current domain at the time no longer represented him as a person, or something similar.
Furthermore, a little later he also made his old content disappear from the internet.

At the time I didn’t have the slightest idea of ​​what he could mean by such a speech but, looking back with my current knowledge, both about my person and what I discovered to be his, I understood perfectly what that sentence meant.

Meanwhile, even though Deadname had become just a past memory, the years continue to pass and the Earth continues to turn.
On some occasions, her character comes to mind, not only to me alone, but also to other people who remember what she was.
For example, sometimes a friend of mine and I, speaking in private, since we were first and foremost in this personal situation, joked by saying things like “Deadname deleted everything because she had to settle”.
And so, every time, she laughed. If something like this, thought and said at random based on nothing, had ever proven to be true, then we would have officially become Official Universal Based Distributors of redpills.

A (seemingly) new personality

Anyway, back to the present day; a few weeks ago, precisely.

As practically always, I was at the PC, doing things and seeing them on the Web. At a certain point, I don’t even remember exactly how, I came across a profile of Censored, which I found to have some interesting things.
I decide to watch a video of him and, immediately, as soon as I open it, there is some detail that takes me by surprise. The voice, in particular, strikes me as inaccurately modulated. It’s a concept I can’t exactly explain. In short, we are talking about that kind of modulation which in many people does not raise doubts apart from “this voice seems strange to me”, but which in me, having a similar personal experience (but I would say more unsuccessful), makes one think “but this person is transgender?”

Evidently, however, at that moment I had more important questions in my hands, because, among all his public profiles, I decided to just quickly look at the biographies, some original textual posts, some reshared ones, some photos including some selfies, and just a few second of other videos.
I found no indication, even veiled, that he might be transgender. I get annoyed immediately, close everything, and go back to mine.

Just a few days later, I come across Censurato’s profile again. A different video catches my attention, so I start watching it.
The more I listen to the voice, however, the more familiar everything becomes. In just a minute I understand that, the voice itself, the way of intoning it, and even a little bit of how the video was made… everything, everything had an aftertaste of Deadname, despite the two characters being of practically opposite genders.

The investigations begin

I decide to let her friend know this immediately before she, curiously, says she thought the same thing.
The stakes this time are really too high to pretend nothing is happening, so we start via chat to collect elements, of any kind, that may coincide between Censored and Deadname, cross-referencing everything we can obtain about the person, and the little that we have more left.

We start with interests, which all seem to match, even the strangest ones. Even the taste in niche memes seems the same.
Even some personal and social details - such as about his family, his cultural status, or the area in which he lives - are consistent with Deadname’s past (even if only my investigation partner remembered these details, I didn’t).
Some content still available online, because it was created in collaboration with other creators, was useful in refreshing the memory of further small details, about her childhood for example.

Big shot!

All these discoveries, however curious, could very well have been a series of coincidences.
However, we did the really big coup, which removed all doubts, because:

• Some particular physical signs, compared between photos of Censured and a few deleted videos (but which we have kept for years!) of Deadname, match perfectly;

• One of the online services used by Deadname at the time keeps a publicly accessible history of all username changes made; the account that was created with the name Deadname has changed its name over time, to Censored.

Case solved

And it is exactly like this, with both small and large details that fit together perfectly, that the puzzle is officially complete: the two characters investigated are the same individual.

The redpill said without knowing, therefore, turned out to be such.
I, however, have no idea why Censured necessarily had to embark on this undertaking to cover his old tracks. I understand, now, why he wanted to delete his old contents: because the character that appeared in them no longer corresponds to who he is today on a gender level - but I don’t understand why pretend that the past never existed .

I would say that I am quite happy to have found again, after so many years, even if as a slightly different character, the same person who managed to entertain me in the past, and I am happy that he still has the passion to do what he did well.

The social digital footprint

This story - which I would say has a happy ending, because I have revealed an important mystery for me - has a clearly visible dark side: it can be said that it proves the existence of a social digital footprint, as I like to call it, which every person has.

With this term I mean a truly unique identifier, which allows anyone who wants, if the basic conditions are met, to identify a specific person always and in any case, despite any partial changes in identity.
I see this imprint as composed of everything that is objectively true about a given individual: the things he likes, the things that have shaped his personality, his social connections, his bodily characteristics, and the things he does or has never done, as well as who knows what other elements that I now forget.
We are not even talking about something strictly linked to the online world, clearly, even if in some cases, as we have seen now, some things about us that touch the Internet form strong elements of the imprint.

How to protect yourself

As long as you are not doing it to escape, so to speak, the consequences of complete immorality, wanting to reset your social footprint, to live in the world as a totally new person, is legitimate; that’s why I protected the identity of the person in the story.

But then, how do you do it?
Protecting yourself from tracking is possible, but it is not at all simple. Just as to protect your computers from web tracking you need to use browsers like Tor Browser which - when communicating with other computers - omit some data and mask others, to protect your personal identity from social tracking you need to avoid sharing too much of yourself with the world, even going so far as to lie if necessary.

Undoubtedly it is impossible to hide what some of the things we are passionate about are, if we have the desire to share them with the world, and perhaps discover like-minded people.
Other things, though - for example, what relatives you have, the name of your first pet, what places you frequent, or how your passion for something began - if you’re trying to erase your past and carry yourself as a totally new person, it’s better not to tell them out loud.