I'd like to discuss private / anonymous posts or accounts.
I know, these posts are public, and linked to you in some way or another. Ok, "semi-anonymous", are you happy now?
No, this simply doesn't cover it.
Yes, this (referencing this and this) is sort of a duplicate, but this goes into a lot more detail, and that didn't see any resolution.
Some may say just create a different account, but:
There's merging, which is a bit of a black-box for most of us (which is good for some reasons), so some unwanted merging may already have occurred.
Why should people have to deal with the hassle of managing separate accounts (which is allowed), which would involve
using dsome stuff to prevent account merging?
My question(s):
How to deal with one's account being linked to a site / post for which one may have privacy concerns, either post-merging or post-epiphany?
Shouldn't there be some functionality added for this, say to keep these on the same account, but not visibly linked?
Possibly the simplest of all solutions - allow certain site profiles to be made not visible from any other profile on a different site for the same account (possibly visible to only moderators, but definitely not 10k+ users, like viewing deleted posts, there are way too many 10k+ users), and those site profiles to not link to any other site profile.
Obviously we'd want to change the workings of Save And Copy Profile To All Stack Exchange Accounts to not copy to these accounts so you can have a different user-name and details on there (and not have these constantly being overwritten).
Some may say this is not an issue, so, possible places one may have privacy concerns:
- Health site - do you really want the world to know all your health problems?
- Workplace site - maybe asking a question about a workplace situation or resigning, would you want your co-workers to know?
- Religion site - definitely a sensitive topic, quite probably not something you want everyone to know.
- Sex site - surely no explanation required.
- Any other site that could negatively affect someone's reputation - Maybe even boardgames or beer
- Any question that could negatively affect someone's reputation on a different site
- Compromising security - e.g. you may generically discuss a weakness in a program you're working on (without referencing the program) for various reasons (possibly without resolving the weakness) which could too easily be linked back to you and thus possibly the program
And no, by 'reputation' I don't mean on the StackExchange network (for the sake of the world, I truly hope that clarification wasn't required).
You could say just don't post things you don't want in the public domain, but I think we should rather welcome people who want to post semi-anonymously.
Some may say this would open the door for spammers or something, but, with a proper framework (or my solution above), this is really not an issue.
EDIT: Even if this request is declined (or implemented at some point in the possibly distant future), I'd still really like to see some resolution for (1.) soon.
EDIT 2: (1.) is intended to be a what's-my-best-course-of-action question for people who don't want to ask publicly for obvious reasons.