Thanks, technology.

After exchanging a few casually anonymous emails through eHarmony’s website a girl gave me her real email address and phone number. I sent her a short email, she replied with a short email back.

Suddenly I know way too much about her.

See, her real email address automatically carries with it her full name in the sender line. Instead of screenname@yahoo.com I get “Jane Doe” (though obviously it’s her real name). I can then take that name, drop it into Google, and BAM!… hello, everything she has ever put online.

In five seconds flat I am on her myspace page, twitter account, and personal blog. I found her facebook page and her brother’s band’s website. My Firefox window is suddenly exploding with new, devilish tabs, each promising byte upon voyeuristic byte of personal information. This is too much too fast. I don’t know what to do.

Is it ok to read through this stuff? I know it’s all hers – she uses the same picture on every site – but simply having access to this stuff does not necessarily mean that I should have access, right? I stand at a moral crossroads. It’s like finding an unlocked diary. Do you read it? She just gave me her email address, not a direct link to her personal life.

I’ve walked into this trap before. In college I spent a bored afternoon searching the net for info about the people in my dorm. A few weeks later I made the mistake of casually making a reference to something in a girl’s past that I could not possibly have otherwise known. “Oh, you must have mentioned it…” I remarked with slick nonchalance when suddenly confronted by a surprised and slightly angry sorta-friend.

It of course occurs to me that when replying to her email I also unwittingly sent her my own real name, replete with potential for a similar Google search on her end. Fortunately, I have been playing digital defense for the past ten years for exactly this reason. It helps that there are many more people on Earth with my name than with hers, but even so I make it a point to use pseudonyms wherever I travel on the net. My real name is not associated with anything other than my facebook and twitter pages, both of which are restricted pending my approval. I religiously use Tony Brooks, LittleWyvern, or some such variation to mask my identity; it’s simple, but generally effective. For a long time I actively blocked search engine spiders from crawling this blog, but one day made the terrible decision to sacrifice anonymity for readership. She can find me eventually of course, but I do what I can to hide amongst the masses. Honestly, she’d have more success searching for my email address than my actual name. A higher percentage of the things on the web tagged ‘littlewyvern’ actually belong to me than those tagged ‘jason alt.’

And yes, I am very aware that at some point this girl will find and read this very post anyways, and to her I say – hello!